Following a whirlwind tour of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, US President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace team, headed by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, arrived in Israel on 23 August 2017. A three-hour meeting with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was followed by a journey to Ramallah and a discussion with Palestinian Authority (PA) president, Mahmoud Abbas. Not once, throughout their time in the region, did Kushner or any of his team, mention the words “two-state solution.”

Hard-liners on each side see a solution only in the utter defeat of the other. Hard-line Israeli opinion favours annexing the West Bank and incorporating it into Israel proper; the Palestinian hard-line objective is to eliminate Israel altogether, converting the whole of what was once Mandate Palestine into a new sovereign state of Palestine. This is not the view held by most Israelis or Palestinians. A joint Palestinian-Israeli poll conducted during June and July 2017 revealed that 53 percent of Israelis and 52 percent of Palestinians favour a two-state solution.

The idea of partition traces its origins back to the Balfour Declaration, the statement by the British government supporting the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the region then known as Palestine, issued exactly one hundred years ago, in 1917. Britain was subsequently mandated by the League of Nations to realize the project, but reconciling Jewish and Arab interests proved impossible and civil disturbance proliferated. The Arab revolt of 1936 finally goaded Britain into establishing a Commission under Lord Peel charged with reaching a workable solution. After much deliberation, Peel proposed the partition of Palestine into two states – one Jewish, the other Arab.

The rationale? “An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities … Their national aspirations are incompatible. The Arabs desire to revive the traditions of the Arab golden age. The Jews desire to show what they can achieve when restored to the land in which the Jewish nation was born. Neither of the two national ideals permits of combination in the service of a single State.”

What was true then remains true today, but the situation has become ever more complicated with the passage of time. “Any proposals to bring the two parties back to the negotiating table,” declared Hamas leader Yahya Moussa in June 2016, “aim at slaying the Palestinian cause.” Hamas’s solution to end the conflict, he declared, is based “on the Israeli withdrawal from the entire Palestinian territories occupied since 1948. Hamas will always opt for armed resistance until the restoration of Palestinian rights.”

The world supports the two-state concept, but the question rarely asked is how peaceful co-existence can be achieved when Hamas, representing a substantial proportion, if not the majority, of Palestinians is opposed tooth and nail to any accommodation with Israel.

Can Kushner and his peace team square the circle?

During his meeting in Ramallah, Kushner is reported to have told Abbas that Trump would present a plan in the next three to four months in exchange for the Palestinian leader abandoning efforts to pursue statehood in international bodies. Abbas is said to have agreed to Kushner’s proposal, but demanded that Trump personally commit to the US peace plan, and asked for a meeting between the two leaders during the UN General Assembly in September 2017.

According to the official PA news outlet Wafa, Abbas came away from his discussion with Kushner pleased with Trump’s commitment to the peace process. “We know that this issue is difficult and complex, but nothing is impossible in the face of good efforts,” he said during his meeting with Kushner. “We affirm that this delegation is working toward peace, and we are working with it to achieve soon what Trump called the ‘peace deal.’”

Prior to his meeting with Abbas, Kushner met with Netanyahu. “The president is very committed to achieving a solution here,” said Kushner, “that will be able to bring prosperity and peace to all people in this area. We really appreciate the commitment of the prime minister and his team to engaging very thoughtfully and respectfully in the way that the president has asked him to do.”

Netanyahu told Kushner he believed peace was “within our reach.”

The “regional umbrella” concept envisages a pro-peace grouping of Arab states under whose aegis the Palestinian leadership might be emboldened to come to a final status agreement with Israel. It seems, from Kushner’s latest itinerary, that Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt might provide this umbrella. What sort of deal, satisfactory to both Israel and the Palestinians, might be hammered out under its cover?

An Arab-Israeli peace conference could be convened with the aim of establishing a sovereign state of Palestine – but only within the context of a new three-state Confederation of Jordan, Israel and Palestine. The two new legal entities, Palestine and the Confederation, would be established simultaneously. The Confederation would be dedicated primarily to defending itself and its constituent sovereign states, with Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian forces acting in concert. It would also foster economic development and infrastructure across the confederate states. Such a solution, based on an Arab-wide consensus, could absorb Palestinian extremist objections, making it abundantly clear that any subsequent armed opposition, from whatever source including Hamas, would be disciplined from within, and crushed by the combined defence forces of the Confederation.

A confederation of three sovereign states, dedicated to providing high-tech security and future growth and prosperity for all its citizens – here’s where an answer might lie.

Dr Kenneth T Bainbridge was the physicist who directed the first atomic bomb test, and Trinity was the codename given to the world’s first nuclear explosion by Dr J Robert Oppenheimer, known as the ‘father of atomic bomb’ for leading the World War II Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb. His reaction to the Trinity test, in which he recalled a line from Bhagavad Gita is also remarkable: “Now I am become death, the destroyers of worlds.”

The “foul and awesome display” of this plutonium implosion device was seen on July 16, 1945 at a site known as Jornade del Muerto, located in the New Mexico desert at Alamogordo, a few miles south of Los Alamos. The world recently observed the 72nd anniversary of the dawn of nuclear age.

Since the first nuclear explosion till now, 2,120 nuclear test explosions have been recorded at dozens of test sites around the world by eight states: P5, India, Pakistan and North Korea. The US tested 1,030 atomic bombs. Russia, the second nuclear power, had 727 nuclear tests. The UK carried out 88 nuclear weapon tests, France 217 and China 47. India tested its first nuclear device in 1974, while reportedly six other nuclear devices were fired in 1998. Responding to India’s nuclear weapon explosions, Pakistan detonated six nuclear devices at Chagai. North Korea exploded three nuclear weapons in 2006, 2009 and 2013 respectively, and another one recently.

To ensure protection of people’s lives and environment, most of the atomic tests are conducted underwater or underground; however, almost 528 tests in early years were detonated in the atmosphere, resulting in spread of radioactive material. Often the underground nuclear explosions also vent radiations into the atmosphere, and leave radioactive contamination in soil.

To advocate the banning of nuclear tests and to educate the world about the legacy impact of nuclear detonation, the UN unanimously approved a draft resolution on December 02, 2009 to declare August 29 the International Day against Nuclear Tests. The resolution was initiated by the Republic of Kazakhstan with a view to commemorate the closure of the Semipalatinsk Nuclear test facility on August 29, 1991, which was the world’s largest underground nuclear test site containing 181 separate tunnels; almost 460 nuclear explosions were conducted there, and a few reportedly resulted in dispersion of plutonium in the environment. The facility was closed by the Kazakhstan government after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

After the establishment of the International Day against Nuclear Test, all states party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) committed themselves to “achieve peace and security of world without nuclear weapons” in May 2010. The inaugural commemoration of the International Day against Nuclear Tests was marked on August 29, 2010.

Therein lies the question as to why states detonate nuclear weapons if they jeopardise human health and environment. And is it enough to celebrate an international day against nuclear tests, and what other international mechanism has been placed in this deference? Pragmatically, states conduct nuclear tests to evaluate new warhead designs and to create more sophisticated weapons. An international instrument to ban all civilian or military purposed nuclear tests in all environments is not a novel agenda of nuclear arms control. In August 1963, the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT), signed by the US, the UK and the USSR, entered into force, and banned the nuclear testing of signatory states in the atmosphere, outer space and underwater but not underground. Though underground, not only nuclear weapons testing continued but the quantity also increased.

Later, the PTBT became redundant with the signing of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in September 1996, which bans all nuclear explosions in all environments. Before the CTBT, all treaties entered into force limit but not ban nuclear tests. Nonetheless, the CTBT will enter into force only after the 44 states listed in the treaty ratify it, of which 41 signed the treaty, 36 ratified, while the DPRK, India and Pakistan have neither signed nor ratified it.

Interestingly, five nuclear-capable states Egypt, Iran, Israel, including two NPT signatory states China and US, have signed but not ratified the CTBT. The conferences to facilitate the objectives of the CTBT takes place every other year, and 2017 marks the 21st anniversary of the opening for signing of the treaty. Since 1996, Pakistan, India and the DPRK have tested their nuclear weapons, while many states including the US and Russia claim they have not tested nuclear weapons since the signing of the treaty.

In 2009 President Barack Obama outlined his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, and later he forged new treaties to reduce the number of and spread of nuclear arsenal. On the contrary, he promised in the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review to uphold the triad of nuclear arsenal supported by every former US president. At the end of 2010, the US ratified the New START agreement with Russia to limit both sides’ arsenal to 1,550, but again no advancement ensued on a treaty that puts a permanent ban on nuclear tests.

Notwithstanding that the US and Russia did not explode nuclear weapons after signing the CTBT, since 1997-2014, the US has held 28 “subcritical, sub-zero tests in the form of computer simulations” at the Nevada National security site. Conversely, Russia has also been conducting subcritical experiments involving both uranium and weapons-grade plutonium at Novaya Zemlya test site near the Arctic Circle. It means that in the absence of an option for underground testing that previously provided assurance about the reliability of deployed nukes, designers of nuclear weapons now depend on computer simulations along with laboratory level nuclear tests to ensure and enhance the safety and reliability of nuclear weapons.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory was the first to conduct the subcritical experiment in 1997. The website of the US Department of State on computer simulation says: “Today, weapons designers benefit from better simulation tools and computers capable of running highly detailed calculations. Successes to date indicate that a cadre of world-class scientists and engineers can employ physics-based simulations, modern experiments, validations against collections of re-analysed data from previous underground nuclear explosive tests, and peer reviews to support stockpile decisions well into the future without the need to return to nuclear explosive testing. These computer simulation advances provide the United States with the ability to monitor and maintain the nuclear weapons stockpile without nuclear explosive testing.”

Evidently, keeping an option by not ratifying the CTBT and conducting subcritical tests shows that the US aims to improve its arsenal qualitatively and wish to maintain its option or ability to conduct onerous underground nuclear testing if it becomes indispensable. Inevitably, Russia would also change its attitude towards the CTBT although it has ratified the CTBT in 2000 if the safety or readiness of their nuclear arsenal would no more comply with the treaty. The CTBT is a zero-yield ban, but the US and the UK held hydronuclear tests with yields up to four pounds, whereas Russia, France and China chose yield limits of 10 tons, 300 tons, or an exemption for peaceful nuclear detonation, respectively. Such yield limits are unacceptable to many NNWS while a preference for peaceful nuclear explosion exemption has been rejected by almost every NNWS.

Thus, the contour of the subject is that there is still a possibility to modernise the nuclear warhead components, verify the reliability of aging nuclear stockpiles and stimulate the environmental effects even if all 44 states ratify the CTBT because it does not stop them from hydronuclear subcritical test through computer simulation; and it allows NWS to qualitatively improve their arsenals at sub-zero. A grim reminder on the International Day against Nuclear Test is that a discriminatory CTBT would not fulfil the nuclear-test-ban ethos till it removes any escape routes including explosives or non-explosive tests.

*The writer is a member of an Islamabad-based think tank Strategic Vision Institute. She works on issues related to nuclear non-proliferation and South Asian nuclear equation, and writes for national and international publications.

As it was facing the problem of extinction following the rout in the local polls in Delhi state which it rules, Delhi’s ruling party Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has won a by-election for the Bawana seat by a big 24,000 votes, leaving behind the real threat BJP and the Congress, which had hoped to enter the Delhi assembly as it ran neck and neck with AAP in the early rounds of counting.

Victory for AAP’s Ram Chander is sweeter as he defeated Ved Prakash, who had won Bawana as an AAP candidate in the assembly elections, but quit the party just before key civic polls in March this year and joined the BJP.

Bawana seat is a reserved seat (Scheduled Caste), with a large number of Dalit voters. The AAP succeeded in playing up BJP’s presumptive ‘anti-Dalit’ image in its favour. Even in the past, this segment of voters had proved to be bankable for AAP.

In fact, the Aam Aadmi Party has retained the Bawana assembly seat in Delhi in a booster shot particularly for Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal who has no answer yet to the shocking defeat of his party in the parliamentary and local polls.

The win is significant as AAP was also trounced by the BJP in the Delhi civic polls, only weeks after being pummeled in assembly elections in Punjab and Goa.The poll was also seen as a test of the popularity of the rival parties ahead the 2019 national election, in which the BJP hopes win all seven Lok Sabha seats as it did in 2014.

Victory for AAP’s Ram Chander is sweeter as he defeated Ved Prakash, who had won Bawana as an AAP candidate in the assembly elections but quit the party just before key civic polls in March this year and joined the BJP.

AAP has demonstrated clearly as to who is boss in Delhi- Kejriwal or Modi. The Modi-Shaw duo that dictates term to national politicians could not pierce through Delhi assembly politics of Kejriwal.

Energetic campaign

After his ambitious national runs that almost always ended in disaster, Delhi chief minister and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) supremo Arvind Kejriwal seems to have finally learnt his lesson. And AAP’s victory in Bawana by-election by a record margin of 24,052 votes is a proof of that.

Kejriwal is back to the grassroots that catapulted him to power in 2015. He’s back to his old strategy and his greatest strength — connecting with people, especially the weaker sections and voters of rural areas, unrecognized colonies, and slum dwellers.

For a party that was trounced by the Congress in Punjab, by the BJP in MCD and by both in the Rajouri Garden bypoll, the Bawana result presents an opportunity for revival. Kejriwal’s outreach in the Outer Delhi constituency speaks to his party’s base – the urban poor.

Faced with popularity crisis, the Delhi Chief Minister, his ministers and other top party colleagues campaigned hard in Bawana, with the supremo Kejriwal camping there every Sunday for the past few weeks, asking voters to choose his party again.

During its campaigning in Bawana, AAP played up the ‘bhagora’ (deserter) factor against BJP. Ultimately, Bawana voters rejected the ‘detractor’ and BJP candidate Prakash. Besides, apart from its senior leaders, both Kejriwal and deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia virtually camped in Bawana to oversee both development work as well as an election strategy

First of all, learning a lesson from its past, AAP fielded Ram Chander, a candidate who had never won any election before. He had contested the last election as a Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) candidate. During Rajouri Garden by-election, AAP had lost because the voters rejected the party for its decision to allow the then-sitting MLA Jarnail Singh to quit the seat and contest the Punjab election.

Out of the six wards in Bawana, BJP had won five in the MCD election. Immediately, after the MCD polls, AAP had set an agenda of bringing development in the unorganized colonies, JJ clusters, villages, etc. The focus was on improving the long-pending civic problems of these areas. This helped the party to reconnect with its grassroots voters. AAP’s relentless demand for Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) system was accepted and all the EVMs used in the Bawana by-election were equipped with VVPAT.

Delhiites have found the AAP and Kejriwal still relevant in their lives. People see AAP still better than other corrupt parties.

Huge setback for BJP

For the national ruling party BJP and PM Modi, the loss of Bawana is a big embarrassment, a land slide. Riding high on a series of victories, especially the by-election to the Rajouri Garden Assembly constituency in Delhi and the elections to the Municipal Corporations of Delhi (MCD), BJP’s hyperbole failed to cut ice with Bawana voters.

The Bawana by-election was important for the BJP and PM Modi as they have to prove that people are behind the decision of the AAP MLA who quit the party and joined the BJP. It was also a prestige battle for the BJP’s Delhi chief Manoj Tiwari, who draws key support from Delhi’s “Poorvanchali” voters, made up of people from UP and Bihar. Bawana, one of Delhi’s biggest assembly constituencies, has a big presence of Poorvanchalis.

The Bawana by-poll result underscores BJP’s failure of strategy and misplaced optimism.

Why did BJP fail to corner Bawana seat? Answer looks very simple. AAP’s strategic attack on BJP failed the BJP’s Delhi assembly strategy.

PM Narendra Modi, trying to take back Delhi poll in the next poll, was said to be watching the Bawana election closely. The BJP and Modi had hoped to add a fifth seat to its kitty after snatching the Rajouri constituency from AAP in another by-election earlier this year.

Contrary to his ‘anti-Narendra Modi’, ‘anti-BJP’ image and criticisms, Kejriwal maintained a stoic silence and restrained communication, ever since the MCD result was announced. Abandoning his strategy of attacking Modi, Kejriwal single-pointedly focused on carrying out the development of the area. An internal post-poll survey by the Pradesh Congress Committee also underlined this fact and mentioned that this would make AAP a winner.

The Delhi BJP was on a high this year after they won a resounding third term in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. The MCD win balanced the scales in favour of the BJP after AAP’s 2015 sweep. But with the Bawana by-poll result, the AAP has stamped its authority on the National Capital. The BJP, which was buoyant after the MCD polls, had to settle with No 2 position.

For BJP’s Delhi unit, winning Bawana seat was important as well as challenging, because it had to keep pace with the spreading dominance of the party under Prime Minister Narendra Modi in other parts of the country.

Keeping an eye on the Purvanchali voters, who account for almost 35 percent of the total electorate in Bawana, Delhi BJP Manoj Tiwari was placed at the forefront of the battle to woo the segment. Here too, BJP failed to anticipate the growing acceptance of AAP in the unrecognized colonies and JJ clusters, where a large number of residents belong to Purvanchal. “Many Purvanchali voters no doubt voted in the favour of BJP, but not all. Considering the body of developmental work done by Kejriwal in this area, a large section voted in the favour of AAP. Instead of favoring regionalism, they chose to go for the development of the area,” a resident of one of the unorganized colonies said.

Delhi BJP president Manoj Tiwari’s ‘Poorvanchali’ identity, which had worked during the local polls, failed this time to win all the Poorvanchali voters, as AAP emphasized on ‘development for all the residents of Bawana’.

In an astute move, the Delhi BJP fielded ex-AAP MLA Ved Prakash, who had quit AAP just before the MCD elections. Following its impressive victory in the MCD elections, the BJP was confident that its strategy of welcoming Opposition rebels in its fold and rewarding them with election tickets would pay dividends. But, it didn’t.

In fact, the strategy badly backfired. Somehow, BJP managed to end up in the second spot — during the initial rounds of counting, Congress was in the second position — in Bawana, thereby saving itself some acute embarrassment.

AAP’s victory has proved that the voters of Bawana have rejected BJP’s strategy of giving tickets to deserters and win. The message is clear from the people of Bawana — ‘if you are a detractor, we won’t accept you’. The strategy applied by BJP has miserably failed,” said an AAP observer.

Observation: Back to people!

AAP’s win in Delhi by-poll has put the BJP and Congress in tight stop and they will have to reschedule their anti-AAP program.

Huge defeat suffered by AAP and Kejriwal forced them to relink themselves with the people of Delhi as mere rhetoric of Kejriwal cannot match the high profile talks of PM Modi.

More importantly, the impact of GST has been felt by the people gradually as process of food and other essentials are sky rocketing with heavy taxes.

Bawana has recast the AAP and Kejriwal in limelight, their importance in Indian politics beyond Delhi, is stressed once again. A post-poll internal survey conducted by the Pradesh Congress Committee had predicted AAP’s victory in the Bawana by-election. The survey stated that AAP’s gaining margin over Congress and BJP would be due to the development work carried out by the Delhi government in the unrecognized colonies and villages in Bawana.

The Bawana by-election was seen as a crucial test of CM Kejriwal and his AAP’s popularity in the only state the party rules, after several setbacks since it swept the Delhi assembly elections in 2015.

The spectacular win by the ruling AAP in Delhi’s Bawana constituency by-election has saved the party from the embarrassment it faced after the defeat at local polls and also stop any future defections by selfish MLAs, if any left in the party. In fact, no MLA would dare quit party and join BJP or Congress because they lose their MLAs seat while the AAP candidate would win the by poll convincingly. So the CM Kejriwal and his team can concentrate on development projects and serve the Delhiites to their full satisfaction. Take the people into confidence in whatever the government does or does not. Whatever deficit in faith, trust and confidence people have not must be erased.

Delhi’s victory of AAP has to do with more than Kejriwal because Delhiites want a change in the politics of Delhi but he is centre of popular change in the capital. Delhiites supported the anti-corruption movement as people are fed with corruption groomed and pampered by both the top and richest national parties Congress and BJP and AAP for their own sake and better future of their children.

Winning back the Bawana means Kejriwal is a shrewd leader Delhiites have found from among whole lot of corrupt political rats. His decision to reconnect with the people won him the Bawana seat. However, whether or he would be able to overcome the Modi effect remains to be seen.

However honest Kejriwal maybe, his honesty cannot survive in politics without kindness. Arrogance with fellow leaders may not win votes for ever. Defeat of the popular AAP in the parliamentary poll and local polls while the AAP rules the capital state has a vital message for Kejriwal and AAP.

Apparently, Kejriwal is a powerful tool the Delhiites use to bring the necessary changes in their lives. They trust him more than anybody else. But Delhi CM should not take the Bawana victory for granted and accept it as a game of Delhiites and should try to accommodate the leaders with varying views on governance but opt for consensus policy to pursue the AAP objectives successfully.

Remember, both the Congress and BJP are after the blood of AAP!

Delhi’s victory of AAP has to do with more than Kejriwal because Delhiites want a change in the politics of Delhi but he is centre of popular change in the capital.

New research, led by the University of Southampton and involving a team of international scientists, suggests that an extreme global warming event 56 million years ago was driven by massive CO2 emissions from volcanoes, during the formation of the North Atlantic Ocean.

The study, published in Nature, used a combination of new geochemical measurements and novel global climate modelling to show that the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was associated with a geologically rapid doubling of atmospheric CO2 in less than 25 thousand years – with volcanoes squarely to blame.

The PETM is the most rapid and extreme natural global warming event of the last 66 million years. It lasted for around 150 thousand years and global temperatures increased by at least 5oC – a temperature increase comparable with projections of modern climate beyond the end of this century. While it has long been suggested that the PETM event was caused by the injection of carbon into the ocean and atmosphere; the ultimate trigger, the source of this carbon, and the total amount released, have up to now all remained elusive.

It had been known that the PETM roughly coincided with the formation of massive ‘flood basalts’ – large stretches of ocean floor coated in lava, resulting from of a series of huge eruptions. These occurred as Greenland first started separating from north-western Europe, thereby creating the North Atlantic Ocean, the vestiges of which are still continuing in miniature in Iceland today. What has been missing is evidence linking these huge volcanic outpourings to the carbon release and warming that marks the PETM.

Dr Marcus Gutjahr, who led the study while a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Southampton, and is now at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel Germany, explained: “In order to identify the source of carbon we first generated a new record of the change in ocean pH (a measure of its acidity) through the PETM, by measuring changes in the balance of isotopes of the element boron in ancient marine fossils called foraminifera.”

The geochemical facilities at the University of Southampton is one of few locations in the world where this kind of work can be carried out. Foraminifera are tiny marine plankton that live near the sea surface and the chemical makeup of their microscopic shells records the environmental conditions of the time when they lived, millions of years ago.

Professor Andy Ridgwell from University of California, Riverside continued, “Ocean pH tells us about the amount of carbon absorbed by ancient seawater, but we can get even more information by also considering changes in the isotopes of carbon, as these provide an indication of its source. When we force a numerical global climate model to take into account both sets of changes, the results point to the large-scale volcanism associated with the opening of the North Atlantic as the primary driver of the PETM.”

The team found that the PETM was associated with a total input of more than 10,000 petagrams of carbon from a predominantly volcanic source. This is a vast amount of carbon – some 30 times larger than all the fossil fuels burned to date and equivalent to all current conventional and unconventional fossil fuel reserves. In their computer model simulations, it resulted in the concentration of atmospheric CO2 increasing from 800 parts per million to above 2000 ppm. The Earth’s mantle contains more than enough carbon to explain this dramatic rise and it would have been released as magma, pouring from volcanic rifts at the Earth’s surface.

Professor Gavin Foster from the University of Southampton said: “How the ancient Earth system responded to this carbon injection at the PETM can tell us a great deal about how it might respond in the future to man-made climate change. For instance, we found that Earth’s warming at the PETM was about what we would expect given the CO2 emitted and what we know about the sensitivity of the climate system based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. However, compared with today’s human-made carbon emissions, the rate of carbon addition during the PETM was much slower, by about a factor of 20.”

Dr Philip Sexton from the Open University in Milton Keynes continued: “We found that carbon cycle feedbacks, like methane release from gas hydrates which were once the favoured explanation of the PETM, did not play a major role in driving the event. On the other hand, one unexpected result of our study was that enhanced organic matter burial was important in ultimately drawing down the released carbon out of the atmosphere and ocean and thereby accelerating the recovery of the Earth system. This shows the real value of studying these ancient warming events as they provide really valuable insights into how Earth behaves when its climate system and carbon cycle are dramatically perturbed.”

Feeling tired? Even if we aren’t tired, why do we yawn if someone else does? Experts at the University of Nottingham have published research that suggests the human propensity for contagious yawning is triggered automatically by primitive reflexes in the primary motor cortex — an area of the brain responsible for motor function.

Their study — ‘A neural basis for contagious yawning’ — has been published in the academic journal Current Biology. It is another stage in their research into the underlying biology of neuropsychiatric disorders and their search for new methods of treatment.

Their latest findings show that our ability to resist yawning when someone else near us yawns is limited. And our urge to yawn is increased if we are instructed to resist yawning. But, no matter how hard we try to stifle a yawn, it might change how we yawn but it won’t alter our propensity to yawn. Importantly, they have discovered that the urge to yawn — our propensity for contagious yawning — is individual to each one of us.

Stephen Jackson, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, in the School of Psychology, led the multidisciplinary study. He said: “We suggest that these findings may be particularly important in understanding further the association between motor excitability and the occurrence of echophenomena in a wide range of clinical conditions that have been linked to increased cortical excitability and/or decreased physiological inhibition such as epilepsy, dementia, autism, and Tourette syndrome.”

Echophenomena isn’t just a human trait

Contagious yawning is triggered involuntarily when we observe another person yawn — it is a common form of echophenomena — the automatic imitation of another’s words (echolalia) or actions (echopraxia). And it’s not just humans who have a propensity for contagious yawning — chimpanzees and dogs do it too.

Echophenomena can also be seen in a wide range of clinical conditions linked to increased cortical excitability and/or decreased physiological inhibition such as epilespsy, dementia, autism and Tourette syndrome.

The neural basis for contagious yawning

The neural basis for echophenomena is unknown. To test the link between motor excitability and the neural basis for contagious yawning the Nottingham research team used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). They recruited 36 adults to help with their study. These volunteers viewed video clips showing someone else yawning and were instructed to either resist yawning or to allow themselves to yawn.

The participants were videoed throughout, and their yawns and stifled yawns were counted. In addition, the intensity of each participant’s perceived urge to yawn was continuously recorded.

Using electrical stimulation they were also able to increase the urge to yawn.

Georgina Jackson, Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychology in the Institute of Mental Health, said: “This research has shown that the ‘urge’ is increased by trying to stop yourself. Using electrical stimulation we were able to increase excitability and in doing so increase the propensity for contagious yawning. In Tourettes if we could reduce the excitability we might reduce the ticks and that’s what we are working on.”

The search for personalized treatments

TMS was used to quantify motor cortical excitability and physiological inhibition for each participant and predict the propensity for contagious yawning across all the volunteers.

The TMS measures proved to be significant predictors of contagious yawning and demonstrated that each individuals’s propensity for contagious yawning is determined by cortical excitability and physiological inhibiton of the primary motor cortext.

The research has been funded by ESRC doctoral training award to Beverley J Brown and is part of Nottingham’s new Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) leading research into mental health technology with the aim of using brain imaging techniques to understand how neuro modulation works.

Professor Stephen Jackson said: “If we can understand how alterations in cortical excitability give rise to neural disorders we can potentially reverse them. We are looking for potential non-drug, personalised treatments, using TMS that might be affective in modulating inbalances in the brain networks.”

This latest research follows the publication of their study ‘On the functional anatomy of the urge-for-action’ which looked at several common neuropsychiatric disorders associated with bodily sensations that are perceived as an urge for action.

Newly discovered human-like footprints from Crete may put the established narrative of early human evolution to the test. The footprints are approximately 5.7 million years old and were made at a time when previous research puts our ancestors in Africa – with ape-like feet.

Ever since the discovery of fossils of Australopithecus in South and East Africa during the middle years of the 20th century, the origin of the human lineage has been thought to lie in Africa. More recent fossil discoveries in the same region, including the iconic 3.7 million year old Laetoli footprints from Tanzania which show human-like feet and upright locomotion, have cemented the idea that hominins (early members of the human lineage) not only originated in Africa but remained isolated there for several million years before dispersing to Europe and Asia.

The discovery of approximately 5.7 million year old human-like footprints from Crete, published online this week by an international team of researchers, overthrows this simple picture and suggests a more complex reality.

Human feet have a very distinctive shape, different from all other land animals. The combination of a long sole, five short forward-pointing toes without claws, and a hallux (“big toe”) that is larger than the other toes, is unique. The feet of our closest relatives, the great apes, look more like a human hand with a thumb-like hallux that sticks out to the side. The Laetoli footprints, thought to have been made by Australopithecus, are quite similar to those of modern humans except that the heel is narrower and the sole lacks a proper arch.

By contrast, the 4.4 million year old Ardipithecus ramidus from Ethiopia, the oldest hominin known from reasonably complete fossils, has an ape-like foot. The researchers who described Ardipithecus argued that it is a direct ancestor of later hominins, implying that a human-like foot had not yet evolved at that time.

The new footprints, from Trachilos in western Crete, have an unmistakably human-like form. This is especially true of the toes. The big toe is similar to our own in shape, size and position; it is also associated with a distinct ‘ball’ on the sole, which is never present in apes. The sole of the foot is proportionately shorter than in the Laetoli prints, but it has the same general form.

In short, the shape of the Trachilos prints indicates unambiguously that they belong to an early hominin, somewhat more primitive than the Laetoli trackmaker. They were made on a sandy seashore, possibly a small river delta, whereas the Laetoli tracks were made in volcanic ash.

“What makes this controversial is the age and location of the prints,” said Professor Per Ahlberg at Uppsala University, last author of the study.

At approximately 5.7 million years, they are younger than the oldest known fossil hominin, Sahelanthropus from Chad, and contemporary with Orrorin from Kenya, but more than a million years older than Ardipithecus ramidus with its ape-like feet. This conflicts with the hypothesis that Ardipithecus is a direct ancestor of later hominins. Furthermore, until this year, all fossil hominins older than 1.8 million years (the age of early Homo fossils from Georgia) came from Africa, leading most researchers to conclude that this was where the group evolved.

However, the Trachilos footprints are securely dated using a combination of foraminifera (marine microfossils) from over- and underlying beds, plus the fact that they lie just below a very distinctive sedimentary rock formed when the Mediterranean sea briefly dried out, 5.6 millon years ago. By curious coincidence, earlier this year, another group of researchers reinterpreted the fragmentary 7.2 million year old primate Graecopithecus from Greece and Bulgaria as a hominin. Graecopithecus is only known from teeth and jaws.

During the time when the Trachilos footprints were made, a period known as the late Miocene, the Sahara Desert did not exist; savannah-like environments extended from North Africa up around the eastern Mediterranean. Furthermore, Crete had not yet detached from the Greek mainland. It is thus not difficult to see how early hominins could have ranged across south-east Europe and well as Africa, and left their footprints on a Mediterranean shore that would one day form part of the island of Crete.

“This discovery challenges the established narrative of early human evolution head-on and is likely to generate a lot of debate. Whether the human origins research community will accept fossil footprints as conclusive evidence of the presence of hominins in the Miocene of Crete remains to be seen,” said Per Ahlberg.

It’s sunny in downtown Montreal and pouring rain at the airport. Such events will be more likely in the future.

The climate of the city is changing and will continue to do so at a rapidly increasing rate and with much more spatial variability in the future.

That’s according to new research from Concordia’s Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering.

MASc student Pablo Jaramillo and assistant professor Ali Nazemi recently published a study on water security in Sustainable Cities and Society. In it they set out to test the reliability of NASA’s downscaled climate data set, the NEX-GDDP, as a tool for accurately modelling long-term annual climate impacts on the scale of a city.

Using the Greater Montreal Area and its neighbouring regions for their case study, the researchers compiled observed data recorded at eight local weather stations from 1950 to 2006. They then compared it to data yielded from the NASA data set for the same period and common temporal and spatial scales.

They found significant trends in the city’s climate, which can be captured fairly well by the downscaled data.

Comparing the projected trends from 2006 to 2099 with past observed trends, they showed that the Montreal region’s climate will continue to change at a faster, more intense rate and with more pronounced spatio-temporal variability.

“This means that we will see more differences in the long-term climate over the Island of Montreal and its neighbouring regions,” said Nazemi, the study’s lead researcher.

“We can clearly see more variability in climate characteristics, such as extreme rainfall and temperature, as well as the number of days with extreme hot or cold temperature over the same region.”

‘One-size-fits-all will no longer be feasible’

According to Nazemi, this finding will have huge implications for urban management.

“Climate plays a key role in the design and operation of urban infrastructure and to a large extent determines water and energy demands. As a result, changes in climate conditions will have direct impacts on how we design almost any aspect of the city, from its drainage system to its energy use,” he explained.

“Most of the time, we consider a single value in relation to the design of these systems and we assume that this value will remain unchanged during the infrastructure’s lifespan, Nazemi added.

“We already know that this is not the case anymore due to climate change; but as the spatial variance in the projected changes in our climate also increases, the current approach of one-size-fits-all will no longer be feasible. For instance, a sewage system designed to prevent flooding in downtown Montreal may fail to prevent flooding in Dorval.”

Accordingly, one of the main takeaways of the study is that urban management should move toward local design and management as opposed to city-wide solutions to climate change impacts.

In addition, while the findings confirm that downscaled models can reproduce observed rates of change in the historical climate of a city, the discrepancies in the long-term climate conditions limit the applicability of the downscaled climate projections.

For Nazemi, this points to the need for more robust technology for the assessment of climate change impacts at the local level.

“Whether the downscaled climate projections can adequately inform climate impact assessments in a city like Montreal depends on the type of management problem and the resulting decisions,” he said.

“Because of some limitations, we advocate considering more holistic frameworks. These approaches should ideally be applied in conjunction with acclaimed top-down approaches to support climate change vulnerability assessment in Montreal until improved climate modelling capability becomes available.”

Bishops in Sri Lanka have condemned a government move to allow abortion in some circumstances.

Cabinet has approved presentation of a bill to parliament to legalize abortion when a pregnancy is due to rape or if a fetus is diagnosed with a “lethal” congenital malformation.

The Sri Lankan bishops’ conference stressed that the church believes life begins at conception.

A person could not safeguard their own rights at the expense of violating somebody else’s rights, said Bishop Valence Mendis of Chilaw, secretary general of the bishops’ conference.

Bishop Mendis, in a joint statement with Bishop J. Winston S.Fernando, president of the bishops’ conference, defended the “right to life” of an unborn child.

An estimated 600 illegal abortions take place in Sri Lanka every day, including many in factory zones where large numbers of women work.

The Sri Lankan bishops’ conference urged all Catholics to oppose both illegal and legal abortions.

Plans to allow abortions in some circumstances were abandoned amid protest demonstrations in 2002.

Caritas and other church groups organize awareness programs dealing with a range of maternal issues, including abortion.

According to media reports, 10 to 12 percent of maternal deaths are due to excessive bleeding and infections after unsafe, illegal abortions.

In Sri Lanka, abortion is currently illegal except to save the life of the mother.

Contradicting the opinion expressed by the bishops, some young people and women rights’ activists said through social media that women should be able to terminate pregnancies resulting from rape.

Nalani Hettiarachchi, a women rights activist in Colombo, noted that illegal abortions are the largest single cause of maternal deaths.

Ninety percent of abortions were carried out on married women, Hettiarachchi said.

Ukrainian authorities have detained and expelled several foreign journalists in recent weeks, most recently Russian reporter Anna Kurbatova, Human Rights Watch said today. In just over a month, the Security Services of Ukraine (SBU) have expelled or denied entry to at least five foreign journalists – three from Russia and two from Spain – for allegedly engaging in anti-Ukrainian “propaganda.”

“The Ukrainian government’s practice of accusing journalists of anti-Ukraine bias, then expelling them or denying them entry, is a serious violation of its international human rights commitments,” said Tanya Cooper, Ukraine researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Barring journalists is short-sighted and vindictive, and undermines Ukraine’s pledges on democratic reforms and the rule of law.”

On August 30, 2017, the SBU in Kyiv detained Kurbatova, a journalist with Channel One, a major Russian television station. An SBU spokesperson announced via Facebook that Kurbatova had been expelled and banned from Ukraine for three years. The spokesperson also said that this would happen to “anyone who allows themselves to discredit Ukraine.”

In one of her latest reports from Kyiv, Kurbatova described Ukraine’s Independence Day anniversary as a “sad celebration” due to the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine and economic hardships in the country.

Kurbatova’s detention and removal from Ukraine is the latest example of mistreatment of foreign journalists.

On August 25, the SBU denied entry to two Spanish journalists, Antonio Pampliega and Manuel Ángel Sastre, and barred them for three years. Pampliega and Sastre work for several media outlets, and had covered the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine. The SBU accused the journalists of carrying out “activities countering national interests of Ukraine.”

On August 29, Ukraine’s Ministry of Information Policy released a statement expressing concern about the journalists’ situation and claiming that it had “filed requests to the relevant law enforcement agencies, including the SBU, asking for a detailed explanation.” The journalists wrote on Twitter that they had been detained in the Kyiv Boryspil airport for 20 hours, “treated like criminals,” and then sent back to Spain without explanation. The journalists covered a variety of issues related to the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine, including the plight of civilians in the conflict zone, and criticized the Ukrainian government for not doing enough to protect them.

On August 14, the SBU detained and deported Tamara Nersesyan, a correspondent with the Russian state television and radio company VGTRK, accusing her of “actions damaging to Ukraine’s national interests.” Nersesyan was banned from entering the country for three years. Another VGTRK journalist, Dariya Grigorieva, was expelled from Ukraine in April and banned for five years.

On July 26, the SBU deported Maria Knyazeva, a journalist with Russian television channels Rossiya 1 and Rossiya 24. The SBU also banned Knyazeva from entering Ukraine on the grounds of “biased coverage of the situation in Ukraine.”

The Representative on Freedom of the Media of the Organization for the Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Harlem Desir, expressed concern over the detentions and expulsions of journalists. Ukraine is a member of the OSCE and the Council of Europe, as well as a party to the European Convention on Human Rights and has taken on specific obligations to respect and protect freedom of expression and support media freedom.

Much of the mainstream media in Russia, including television, print, and online outlets, are either owned or indirectly controlled by the state and have become the voice of the government. Moreover, some use elaborate propaganda tools, including blatant misinformation, to mobilize patriotic support for the government and its agenda, including support of armed groups in eastern Ukraine and Russia’s occupation of Crimea.

“Ukraine has legitimate reasons to be concerned about biased or false media reports, particularly Russian propaganda, but barring journalists is not the answer,” Cooper said. “The authorities should make Ukraine a country where media can convey different views without fear of retaliation.”

Two German citizens have been detained in Turkey for what Berlin believes are “political” reasons, the German government said, the latest in a string of arrests of European citizens that have put relations with Ankara under unprecedented strain.

Germany was not officially informed of the detentions, which took place at Antalya airport on Thursday, August 31, leaving Berlin’s consulate in the coastal city of Izmir to learn of their arrest from “non-state sources”, a spokeswoman said.

Many European citizens have been detained in Turkey over the past year, accused of involvement in last year’s failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom many accuse of purging opposition under the cover of a crackdown.

“We’re trying to establish what they are charged with,” said foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Adebahr at a news conference on Friday. “We must assume that it’s a political charge, suspicion of terrorism, as with the others.”

Diplomats had not been able to contact them, she added, with Friday’s public holiday celebrating the Muslim festival of Eid a possible reason for delays in contacting officials.

Twelve German citizens are currently in Turkish detention on political charges. Of them, four hold dual citizenship. Among them is German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yucel, whose detention hit the 200-day mark on Friday.

The international community should consider imposing a resolution to the conflict in Syria that does not involve President Bashar Assad retaining power, France’s foreign minister said Friday.

A transition “cannot be done” with Assad, “who murdered part of his population and who has led millions of Syrians to leave” their homeland, Jean-Yves Le Drian said.

“If we wait for the Syrians to agree, we will wait a long time and there will be thousands more dead.”

Assad’s fate has hampered all international diplomatic efforts to end the conflict. “The shift in international attitudes toward the Syrian conflict has been shaped more by the failure of the opposition than their perception of Assad,” Syrian analyst Hassan Hassan told Arab News.

“Even though the regime has won the strategic war, in that no country seriously seeks its downfall anymore, it’s unlikely to come out of the diplomatic cold anytime soon.”

Joseph Bahout, a fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Arab News that the notion that Assad has “won” has become the dominant narrative in the West, and his inclusion in a transition should be expected. But “will this lead to a solution? Of course not.”

Ibrahim Assil, a non-resident fellow at the Orient Research Center in Dubai, strongly cautioned the international community against turning a new page with Assad.

“Holding war criminals like Assad accountable is crucial for international security,” he told Arab News.

“Tyrants like Assad are watching, and the international community is sending them a message that it will accept them even if they crush their people militarily, commit war crimes and atrocities, and even use chemical weapons.”

Le Drian told RTL radio: “He (Assad) cannot be part of the solution. The solution is to find with all the actors a calendar with a political transition that will enable a new constitution and elections.”

While Britain has said Assad must go, diplomats say the administration of US President Donald Trump has yet to outline a vision for a political process in Syria and is focusing primarily on defeating Daesh and countering Iran, AFP reported.

The UN Security Council has already adopted a Syria transition road map, and two diplomats said the latest French idea was to get the five permanent members of the council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the US — to agree first how to move forward.

The Security Council would then bring into the fold the main regional powers, although diplomats said it was pointless without Iran’s involvement. There were also questions on how to win US support given the Trump administration’s staunch anti-Iranian position.

Meanwhile, a new round of talks on the conflict in Syria will be held in Astana on Sept. 14-15, Kazakhstan announced Friday, with key powers looking to shore up safe zones on the ground.

Russia and Iran, which back the Syrian regime, and opposition supporter Turkey will look to work out more details of the “de-escalation zones,” including the thorny issue of who will police the northern Idlib region, the Kazakh Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

“The participants also intend to confirm the maps of the de-escalation zones in the provinces of Idlib, Homs and Eastern Ghouta,” it said.

The statement did not mention a fourth zone in the south of Syria, where Israel and the US have been wary about seeing Iran involved after a cease-fire was agreed between Moscow and Washington in July.

Russia has already deployed military police to the zone in the south, in Eastern Ghouta near Damascus, and in part of Homs under the safe zone deals.

Moscow has been spearheading the Astana peace talks since the start of the year in a bid to pacify Syria after its game-changing intervention on the side of Assad.

In another development, US-backed Syrian fighters ousted Daesh from Raqqa’s Old City on Friday, bringing them closer than ever to the terrorist bastion’s well-defended and densely populated heart.

Backed by US-led coalition airstrikes, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) first broke into Raqqa in early June and penetrated its Old City a month later.

On Friday, they successfully captured the entire historic district from militants, according to AFP.

“Our forces today seized full control of the Old City in Raqqa after clashes with Daesh,” spokesman Talal Sello said.

By Amir Taheri*

According to the initial narrative of the Khomeinist ideology, the perfect state to which Muslims should aspire was the brief period when Ali ibn Abi Taleb governed the Caliphate against a background of revolts and civil war. However, it now seems that Khomeinist zealots have found another ideal model outside the world of Islam.

That model is North Korea, which Khomeinists present as a paragon of heroic resistance against the American “Great Satan.” The daily Kayhan, believed to reflect the views of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, recently ran editorials praising North Korea’s “brave defiance of arrogance” by testing long-range missiles in the face of “cowardly threats” by the US. In one editorial last month, the paper invited those who urge dialogue with the US to learn from North Korea’s “success in humiliating the Great Satan.”

The editorial provoked some critical responses from the “reformist” wing of the ruling clique, with president Hassan Rouhani’s unofficial spokesman expressing regret that Iran was being asked to downgrade to the level of “a pariah in a remote corner of Asia.”

Nevertheless, last month Kim Yong Nam, president of the North Korean People’s Assembly, was given red-carpet treatment during a 10-day visit to Tehran at the head a 30-man military and political delegation. He was granted a rare two-hour audience with Khamenei. During his stay, he inaugurated North Korea’s new embassy, which has an expanded military cooperation section.

At first glance, the Khomeinist “republic” and the regime in Pyongyang seem to have little in common. It might appear that the only thing they share is a primitive version of anti-Americanism, an affliction that affects many others, even in Western democracies, albeit in milder forms.

Seen by Khomeinists, who pretend to be sole custodians of the only true religion, the Kimists, who regard religion as confused mumbo-jumbo, must be regarded as adversaries if not outright enemies. Yet such is their mutual attraction that the Kimists have even allowed the Khomeinists to set up a mosque in Pyongyang provided they do not try to convert North Koreans.

In the spring of 1979, Kim Il Sung, the founder of the dynasty and grandfather of the present supreme leader Kim Jong Un, was among the first to congratulate Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini on the seizure of power by mullahs.

A few weeks later, Khomeini, then stationed in Qom, broke his rule of not talking to foreign emissaries by receiving North Korean ambassador Chabeong Uk for a long session during which the ayatollah dictated a message of friendship to Kim Il Sung and invited “the masses of Korea” to expel the Americans from the peninsula.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in September 1980, Kim Il Sung was the first to offer assistance to the Islamic Republic by supplying its version of the Soviet Scud missiles. In January 1981, invited by Iran, the North Koreans set up a military advisory mission in Tehran to help the newly created Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to develop tactics and strategies in the war against Iraq.

One tactic quickly adopted by the Iranians was the use of “swarm attacks” by masses of teenagers sent to clear Iraqi minefields at the cost of thousands of lives, a tactic that Kim Il Sung had developed in the Korean War against the Americans.

North Korea became one of only two nations to sign a military pact of sorts, including joint staff conversations, with Iran. (The other is in Syria which signed in 2007.)

Iran’s top contact man with the North Korean military mission was Khamenei, then a mid-ranking mullah operating as deputy defense minister. The new friends started military cooperation in 1982 with special emphasis on helping Iran develop a range of missiles.

Getting to know the North Koreans, Khamenei developed a profound admiration for their “discipline and readiness to sacrifice for their struggle.” But it was not until six years later that Khamenei, by that time named president of Iran, could express that admiration directly in a state visit to Pyongyang.

According to those who accompanied him on that visit, he saw North Korea as the “ideal state” that lacked only religious faith.

“Khamenei was impressed by how everything worked like the clockwork,” says Hassan Nami, a member of the entourage. “The fact that in North Korea the individual was dissolved in the collective symbolized by the supreme leader overwhelmed Khamenei.”

Khamenei’s visit to North Korea in May 1989 was the first to give him the feeling that he was the rising leader of a rising new power on the world scene. The North Koreans declared a holiday for schools and factories to mobilize a million people to line the streets to greet him. In a rare gesture, Kim Il Sung himself went to the airport to meet the visitor. The North Korean despot then chaired a special session of the People’s Assembly to hear Khamenei’s speech, which included a thinly disguised invitation to Koreans to return to religious belief.

In the end, however, the North Koreans adopted nothing from Khomeinism while Khamenei adopted much of Kim Il Sung’s ideology.

Kim’s “juche” (self-reliance) doctrine became Khamenei’s “eqtesad muqawemati” (resistance economics). Khamenei also adopted Kim’s reliance on missiles, caused by the fact that North Korean had no access to modern warplanes, as the main plank of his defense doctrine. The revival of the Shah’s nuclear program was also inspired by Kim who believed a weaker nation enhances its position by owning the ultimate weapon.

When it comes to Khamenei’s rejection of compromise with domestic or foreign adversaries, again Kim was the teacher. Kim preached absolute independence, which meant total disregard for international law, something that Khamenei has made an article of faith for the Islamic Republic.

Going down the list of Khamenei’s beliefs, including his reliance on the military for the survival of the regime, in many cases the real teacher was not Khomeini, but Kim Il Sung.

• Amir Taheri was executive editor in chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at, or written for, innumerable publications and published 11 books. Twitter: @AmirTaheri4.
— This article first appeared in Asharq Al-Awsat. 

By Sam Morgan

(EurActiv) — Finland is set to embrace a decarbonised future by increasing carbon taxes and introducing laws in 2018 that will begin to phase out the use of coal, with more nuclear capacity waiting to offer an alternative fuel source.

The head of Finland’s energy department, Riku Huttunen, told Reuters that the current strategy is to get rid of coal by 2030 and that the process will be started by legislation due next year.

Finland uses the most coal of all the Nordic countries, with about 10% of powering coming from the fossil fuel. Huttunen added that the new rules will leave “room for manoeuvre” to ensure supply security, meaning coal-fired power plants may be left online in case of blackouts.

To cope with the gap left by coal, Finland will have to increase the amount of energy produced from other fuel sources.

Nuclear power could take up the slack as two new reactors are due to come online in 2018 and 2024, also as part of Helsinki’s efforts to cut its dependence on Russian energy imports. Sixty-six percent of coal is imported from Russia.

Finland relies on nuclear power to meet roughly 30% of its energy needs. The World Nuclear Association ranks the country’s reactors as some of the world’s most efficient and it is estimated that capacity could reach 60% by 2025 if all current projects are brought to completion.

But Finland’s increased atomic capacity could be undermined by neighbouring Sweden, which is closing two of its own reactors, meaning there will be less power available through their interconnected energy grids.

The deregulated Nordic energy system is in need of power as it is largely reliant on hydroelectric generation and could therefore face shortages during dry patches.

Sweden is the only country in the world that has more than one nuclear reactor per million inhabitants but there is strong anti-nuclear public sentiment.

Lawmakers addressed this in 2010 by ruling that new nuclear plants can only be built to replace decommissioned ones and only on the same sites as existing stations.

The pressure was increased in 2015 when the energy tax was raised. This prompted state-owned firm Vattenfall to accelerate the timeframe of its planned closure of two reactors from ten years to between three and five years.

By Mariya Cheresheva

The nationalist campaign to change the ‘Arabic-sounding’ name of the highest peak in Bulgaria, and rename it after a Christian saint, has suffered another setback.

The Bulgarian Presidency’s committee on naming objects of national significance and communities has refused to back a call to rename the Musala peak, the highest point in the country, after Bulgaria’s patron saint.

The presidency rejected the appeal, filed by Sofia’s regional governor, Ilian Todorov, on the grounds that it requires expert consultations and “serious public debate”, a letter to the regional administration, quoted by Focus agency, reveals.

The commission pointed out also the unclear etymology of the name of the 2,925-metre-high summit, which some believe comes from the Arabic word “musalla” – a place for Muslim prayer.

Another reason why it rejected the claim is that changing the name of the peak would mean redoing maps, documents and tourist guides, which is not seen as desirable at the moment.

Todorov has repeatedly asked President Rumen Radev to change the “Turkish-Arabic” name of the peak to St Ivan Rilski, one of the most important saints of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and the patron saint of Bulgaria.

He denied being inspired by a desire for “political dividends, egoism, pride or fame. God and the Orthodox faith are the only and leading motive,” he said in a letter of July 27.

This was not the first time that Todorov’s nationalist Ataka party has demanded that the Presidency changes Musala’s name.

In 2016, the party submitted a similar proposal to ex-President Rosen Plevneliev, who again did not support it.

The name of the Musala peak dates from the period of Ottoman rule in Bulgaria, which lasted from 1396 to 1878. Between 1942 and 1962 it was renamed after Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

By Jim Garamone

About 11,000 National Guardsmen have deployed to support the Federal Emergency Management Agency-led rescue and restoration operations in the region affected by Hurricane Harvey, Defense Department officials said Friday.

A total of 1,638 active-duty service members and 1,254 DoD civilian employees and contractors are also supporting operations in Texas. Another 1,050 service members are prepared to deploy if needed.

Lifesaving remains the priority for civilian and military officials in the state, but floodwaters are beginning to recede in many areas and resources are being dedicated to recovery operations, officials said.

Texas National Guardsmen evacuated 1,109 personnel, rescued 6,283 personnel and assisted 5,360 personnel, officials reported.

DoD officials said that active-duty troops have rescued 2,038 people in the region. The operations continue and U.S. Northern Command has deployed 100 high-water vehicles to Katy, Texas. Northcom has also deployed 87 helicopters, four C-130 Hercules aircraft and eight pararescue teams.

The Coast Guard has 46 helicopters and 10 fixed-wing aircraft conducting missions. The service also deployed shallow-water boats that are assisting the block-by-block search and rescue efforts, defense officials reported. More than 10,500 people have been rescued or assisted by Coast Guardsmen.

DoD assets are also standing by to aid evacuation efforts. Seven C-17 Globemaster III aircraft at Charleston Air Force Base, South Carolina, and two C-5 Galaxy aircraft at El Paso, Texas, are on alert status.

Recovery Efforts

The Army Corps of Engineers is conducting air and ground post-storm assessments and harbor surveys in coordination with interagency partners. Two dredges are on standby, with two USACE dredges in ready reserve. Corps planners are also looking to providing up to 13,000 housing units.

The Defense Logistics Agency is providing 10 million shelf-stable meals — the civilian equivalent of meals, ready-to-eat. The agency is also providing 1.5 million liters of water a day.

On the medical side, Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio is providing medical treatment for up to 7,000 victims of the hurricane and associated flooding.

The department also set up a disaster aeromedical staging facility at Houston’s George Bush International Airport. Five C-130s and six aeromedical evacuation crews are on alert.

And more help is coming. The Navy ordered the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge, with the embarked 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, and the dock landing ship USS Oak Hill to sail to the region. The ships departed yesterday from their home ports in Virginia and are set to arrive Sept. 6. They will be in position to provide medical support, maritime security and medium and heavy lift air support and can assist with the delivery and distribution of recovery supplies, Navy officials said. These types of ships were also used for similar missions after Hurricane Katrina.

There could be water on multiple Earth-sized planets orbiting the recently discovered TRAPPIST-1 dwarf star – making them potentially habitable – according to an international collaboration of researchers, including the University of Warwick.

Using the NASA/ESA Hubble telescope to estimate whether there might be water on the surface of the seven planets around TRAPPIST-1, the researchers found that although the innermost planets must have lost most – if not all – of their water, the outer planets of the system might still harbour substantial amounts.

The researchers measured the ultraviolet (UV) irradiation that the planets receive from TRAPPIST-1, as these UV rays cause water molecules to break apart into their constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms – making them vulnerable to being driven off into space by the X-ray radiation from the star.

Professor Peter Wheatley, from the University of Warwick’s Astronomy & Astrophysics Group in the Department of Physics, played a significant part in the project, measuring the X-ray irradiation of the planets by their parent star.

The observed amount of ultraviolet radiation emitted by TRAPPIST-1 suggests that the planets could have lost gigantic amounts of water over the course of their history.

This is especially true for the innermost two planets of the system, TRAPPIST-1b and TRAPPIST-1c, which receive the largest amount of UV energy, and could have lost more than twenty Earth-oceans-worth of water during the last eight billion years.

However, the outer planets of the system — including the planets e, f and g which are in the habitable zone — should have lost much less water, suggesting that they could have retained some on their surfaces.

According to Professor Wheatley, “It is exciting that we can now study the environments of individual Earth-sized planets. Our results suggest that water, and potentially life, could have survived in the TRAPPIST-1 system, despite the relatively intense ultraviolet and X-ray irradiation of the planets.”

In February 2017, astronomers announced the discovery of seven Earth-sized planets orbiting the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, 40 light-years away. This makes TRAPPIST-1 the planetary system with the largest number of Earth-sized planets discovered so far.

This study was led by the Swiss astronomer Vincent Bourrier from the Observatoire de l’Université de Genève.

Parkinson´s disease is a chronic disease with unknown causes. The disease destroys the brain cells that control body movements. Shivering, stiff arms and legs and poor coordination are typical symptoms of Parkinson’s. The symptoms may develop slowly, and it sometimes takes time to make a correct diagnosis.

Researchers at the Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care (IGS) at the University of Bergen (UiB) have completed a large study that included data from the Norwegian Prescription Database, in cooperation with researchers at Harvard University.

“Our analysis of data from the whole Norwegian population has been decisive for the conclusion in this study,” said Professor Trond Riise at IGS. He leads the registery study in Norway.

100 million prescriptions

Together with colleagues Anders Engeland and Kjetil Bjørnevik, Riise has analyzed more than 100 million Norwegian prescriptions registered since 2004.

In the study, the treatment of Parkinson’s was linked to prescriptions of asthma medicine and the medicine for high blood pressure. It enabled the researchers to see the connection between medicine use and illness.

The UiB-researchers were able to make these comparisons by using the prescription database. The Norwegian analysis was done after researchers at Harvard University found these effects of the medicines in animal tests and in experiments with brain cells in the lab. Their results showed that these different medicines had opposite effects on the risk of Parkinson’s.

Possible new treatment

To find out if these medicines had the same effect on humans, the researchers at Harvard University started to collaborate with the Norwegian research team, and their unique resource of having access to the unique and large Norwegian database, where all Norwegian prescriptions are registered.

“We analysed the whole Norwegian population and found the same results as in the animal testing at Harvard University. These medicines have never been studied in relation to Parkinson’s disease,” said Riise.

Trond Riise underlined the fact tha,t “Our discoveries may be the start of a totally new possible treatment for this serious disease. We expect that clinical studies will follow these discoveries.”

Current methods of measuring electron transfer in photovoltaic panels are ambiguous, but new research supported with EU funding is helping to distinguish between the response of the substrate and that of the sensitiser.

Despite its importance in determining the potential of a photovoltaic device, current methods for monitoring the interfacial electron transfer remain ambiguous. Now, using deep-ultraviolet continuum pulses, Scientists at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have developed a substrate-specific method to detect electron transfer. Published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, their paper entitled ‘Interfacial Electron Injection Probed by a Substrate-Specific Excitonic Signature’ describes how the team has developed a substrate-specific method to detect electron transfer.

Sensitised solar cells, consisting of a molecular or solid-state sensitiser that serves to collect light and inject an electron into a substrate that favours their migration, are among the most studied photovoltaic systems. However, current methodologies, which all use light in the visible-to-terahertz frequencies (wavelengths around 400 – 30000 nm), can deliver ambiguous results. This approach is sensitive to carriers that remain free in the conduction band of the semiconductor substrate. They are therefore unspecific to the type of substrate and cannot be extended to the new generation of solid-state-sensitised solar cells.

The EPFL team aimed to overcome the limitations of current methods of measuring electron transfer, employing two types of dye-sensitised solar conversion systems: one based on titanium dioxide, the other on zinc-oxide nanoparticles, both of which belong to the category of transition-metal oxide (TMO) substrates. Using deep-ultraviolet continuum pulses, EPFL scientists have developed a substrate-specific method to detect electron transfer.

They explain in their paper, ‘(…) we demonstrate the use of deep-ultraviolet continuum pulses to probe the interfacial electron transfer, by detecting a specific excitonic transition in both N719-sensitised anatase TiO2 and wurtzite ZnO nanoparticles.’ The show that, ‘ (…) the signal upon electron injection from the N719 dye into TiO2 is dominated by long-range Coulomb screening of the final states of the excitonic transitions, whereas in sensitized ZnO it is dominated by phase-space filling.’

Transition metal (TM) oxides (TiO2, ZnO, NiO) are large gap insulators that have emerged as highly attractive materials over the past two decades for applications in photocatalysis, solar energy conversion. Despite the huge interest for such materials, the very nature of the elementary electronic excitations (Frenkel, Wannier or charge transfer exciton) is still not established. An Advanced Grant from the EU helped the research under the DYNAMOX (Charge carrier dynamics in metal oxides) project which is developing novel experimental tools that would provide us with hitherto inaccessible information about the charge carrier dynamics in TM oxides. Research conducted in Lausanne will help to identify excitonic transition with more clarity.

Cordis source: Based on project information and media reports

The distribution of private elementary school enrolments in the US has changed over the last half century. This column shows that, overall, fewer middle-class children are now enrolled in private schools. Non-Catholic religious schools play an increasing role in private school enrolments, and today serve more students whose family incomes are in the bottom half of the distribution than Catholic schools do. The increase in residential segregation by income in the US means that urban public schools and urban private schools have less socioeconomic diversity today than they had several decades ago.

By Richard Murnane and Sean Reardon*

Family income inequality in the US has risen sharply in the last few decades (Stone et al. 2016). One of the consequences has been that affluent families increasingly live in different communities than lower-income families. Since most children attend a school close to their home, public schools are increasingly segregated by income (Owens 2016).

Rising inequality may also have led to increasing economic segregation between public and private schools. There is, however, surprisingly little information about whether this has happened. In recent research, we set out to learn whether this has occurred by examining trends in private school enrolments over the last 50 years (Murnane and Reardon 2017).

Over the last half century, the percentage of US elementary students who attend private schools has not changed much; it was 11% in 1970, and 9% in 2011. What has changed is the family income mix of private school students. In 1970, 17% of affluent students attended private schools and in 2011, 16% did so. But, among middle-class families, the enrolment rate dropped from 13% to 7%; among poor families, the rate has always been low. Figure 1 shows trends in private school enrolment rates for children from 20th, 50th, and 90th income percentile families.

Figure 1 Estimated private school enrolment rates by family income percentile

The role of Catholic elementary schools

The decline in Catholic school enrolments has contributed to the changing income mix of private school students. In 1970, 85% of elementary school students (those aged 5 to 11) in the US who were enrolled in a private school were attending a Catholic school. Low tuition fees and scholarships enabled these schools to serve a great many children from low- and middle-income families, as well as those from affluent families. Over the next 40 years, the number of Catholic elementary schools in the US declined 37%. By 2011, only 43% of private elementary school students attended Catholic schools.

Several factors contributed to this decline in Catholic school enrolments. Migration of middle-class families from cities to suburbs deprived urban Catholic schools of much of their historic clientele. Rising costs, spurred in part by the decline in religious vocations, resulted in large increases in Catholic school tuition fees, and a reduced ability to provide scholarships. Between 1970 and 2011, the average fee for tuition in Catholic elementary schools, expressed in 2015 dollars, increased from $873 to $5,858. This far outstripped the 23% increase in the median real income of families with school-aged children during this period. As a result, Catholic elementary schools increasingly serve students from relatively high-income families (see the left-hand panel of Figure 2).

Figure 2 Estimated elementary private school enrolment by family income percentile

Non-sectarian private schools

In contrast to the decline in Catholic school enrolments, the number of students attending non-sectarian private elementary schools has increased in recent decades, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of private school enrolments. In 2011, these schools served 17% of all children enrolled in private elementary schools, up from 10% in 1989. Measured in 2015 dollars, the average tuition in non-sectarian private elementary schools rose from $4,120 in 1979 to $22,611 in 2011. High and rising tuition fees help to explain why enrolment in non-sectarian elementary schools is increasingly concentrated among students from high-income families. This pattern is shown in the middle panel of Figure 2.

Non-Catholic religious schools

These schools have an increasing role in private school enrolments. In 2011, these schools enrolled 40% of students attending private elementary schools, up from 33% in 1989. As with other types of private schools, a higher percentage of children from affluent families attend non-Catholic religious elementary schools than do children from middle- or low-income families.

As the right-hand panel of Figure 2 shows, enrolment trends by family income in non-Catholic religious elementary schools are different. The percentages of children from low- and middle-income families attending non-Catholic religious elementary schools increased between 1987 and 2011, while the percentage from high-income families declined. These trends seem surprising, given that tuition fees in these schools have also increased rapidly, from an average of $3,896 in 1993 to $9,134 in 2011 (in 2015 dollars).

Regional differences help explain this surprising trend. These schools, especially the subset of them known as Conservative Christian schools, are disproportionately located in the South. In 2011, 40% of children enrolled in non-Catholic religious elementary schools, and 47% of those attending Conservative Christian schools, lived in the South. After Supreme Court decisions banning prayer in schools, many conservative Christians felt that public schools did not reflect their values (Cooper 1984). This led them to send their children to schools associated with their churches, despite the high financial cost of doing so.

Perceptions of quality

The perceived quality of the public schools with which private schools compete helps explain the patterns in private school enrolments. The increase in residential segregation by income, especially among families with school-aged children, is that urban public schools increasingly have low-income student populations (Owens 2016, Owens et al. 2016). Average mathematics and reading scores are much lower for students attending urban public schools than for those attending suburban public schools. Student discipline problems are more frequent. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s (the only period for which we have consistently coded data), urban parents with children of school age rated their local public schools as lower quality than suburban parents did. For example, in 1992, 37% of urban parents gave their local schools a grade of A or B, while 50% of suburban parents did so (Phi Delta Kappa 1992).

This may explain why more than one-quarter of students from high-income families living in cities sent their children to private schools in 2013, about the same percentage as did so in 1968. In contrast, high-income families living in suburban communities were much more likely to send their children to public schools. In consequence, urban public schools and urban private schools have less socioeconomic diversity today than they had several decades ago (see Figure 3.)

Figure 3 Estimated elementary private school enrolment by family income percentile

The impact on economic mobility

In summary, the distribution of private elementary school enrolments in the US has changed markedly over the last 45 years. Non-Catholic religious elementary schools today serve more students whose family incomes are in the bottom half of the distribution than Catholic elementary schools do. There has been substantial increase in the percentage of students from high-income families who attend private non-sectarian private schools. Much less is known about these private schools than is known about Catholic schools, which historically were the dominant supplier of private school services in the US, and the subject of a great deal of research.

The trends we documented in this paper indicate an increasingly polarised pattern of school enrolment. US schools – both public and private – are increasingly segregated by income. High-income families increasingly live either in suburbs with expensive housing or enrol their children in private schools. The private schools their children attend are more likely to be expensive non-sectarian schools than was the case four decades ago. Meanwhile, low-income students remain disproportionately concentrated in high-poverty public schools, and even those low-income students in private schools are generally not in expensive, non-sectarian private schools.

Given how difficult it is to build and sustain high quality educational programs in schools serving high concentrations of children from low-income families (Duncan and Murnane 2014), the increasing income segregation of US schools is likely to strengthen the intergenerational transmission of economic inequality, and reduce the potential for upward economic mobility.

*About the authors:
Richard Murnane, Thompson Research Professor of Education and Society at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research

Sean Reardon, Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education, Stanford University

References:
Cooper, B S (1984), “The changing demography of private schools: Trends and implications”, Education and Urban Society 16(4): 429-442.

Duncan, G J and R J Murnane (2014), Restoring opportunity: The crisis of inequality and the challenge for American education, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press and the Russell Sage Foundation.

Murnane, R J and S F Reardon (2017), “Long-term trends in private school enrollments by family income”, NBER Working Paper No. 23571.

Owens, A (2016), “Inequality in children’s contexts: Trends and correlations of economic segregation between school districts, 1990 to 2010”, American Sociological Review 81(3): 549-574.

Owens, A, S F Reardon and C Jencks (2016), “Income segregation between schools and school districts”, American Educational Research Journal 53(4): 1159-1197.

Phi Delta Kappa (1992), “Gallup/phi delta kappa poll # 1992-PDK92: 24th annual survey of the public’s attitudes toward the public schools”, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Cornell University.

Stone, C, D Trisi, A Sherman and E Horton (2016), A guide to statistics on historical trends in income inequality, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has called again for the immediate release of Afgan Mukhtarli, an Azerbaijani journalist who has completed his third month in detention since his abduction in neighbouring Georgia and forcible return to Azerbaijan. He is still being held although now in very poor health.

RSF also reiterated its condemnation of Azerbaijan’s persecution of independent journalists like Mukhtarli, who was living in exile in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, when kidnapped on 29 May.

According to officials at the prison where Mukhtarli is detained, he is in the best of health despite being diabetic. But his lawyers and wife say he has lost 21 kilos since his abduction, has high blood pressure and was denied access to medicine for a long time. He has been refused family visits several times and, despite everything, a court in Baku has just extended his provisional detention until 30 October.

“Afgan Mukhtarli’s detention is a disgrace for both Azerbaijan and Georgia,” said Johann Bihr, the head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk. “Not only is no one able to explain how it began, but now it is being extended in defiance of the most elementary humanitarian principles.”

“We again appeal to the Azerbaijani authorities to free this journalist at once and to drop the trumped-up charges brought against him. And the Georgian authorities must shed all possible light on how he came to be abducted.”

An investigative journalist and activist, Mukhtarli had been living in exile in Georgia since 2015. He was grabbed near his Tbilisi home on the evening of 29 May, bundled into a car, tied up and beaten. He says his abductors wore Georgian criminal police uniforms. The next day his family learned that he was in the custody of the Azerbaijani border police.

According to the Azerbaijani government’s account, Mukhtarli was arrested near the border with 10,000 euros in his pockets. He is charged with contraband, crossing the border illegally and refusing to comply with instructions from the police. He rejects all the charges.

In Georgia, an investigation into Mukhtarli’s “illegal detention” has drawn a blank although several members of the Georgian security services were fired. Surveillance camera recordings near the scene of the abduction were mysteriously tampered with.

Mukhtarli’s wife, Leila Mustafayeva, has criticized the lack of progress and has accused the Georgian authorities of not conducting a serious investigation. In June, members of the European Parliament called for Mukhtarli’s immediate release and the withdrawal of all charges.

Mukhtarli worked for IWPR and the Meydan TV independent news website, often writing about high-level government corruption in Azerbaijan. Shortly before his abduction, he said he was being closely watched and that he was concerned for his safety and the safety other Azerbaijani dissidents in Georgia.

The Azerbaijani authorities have done everything possible to crush media pluralism in recent years. The most outspoken media outlets have all been throttled financially or forcibly closed. Access to their websites is blocked.

The last independent outlet, the Turan news agency, is now being targeted. Its director, Mehman Aliyev, was arrested on 24 August and has been placed in pre-trial detention for three months. Crippled by judicial proceedings, Turan has announced that it will suspend all activities from 1 September onwards.

Azerbaijan is ranked 162nd out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2017 World Press Freedom Index. Its president, Ilham Aliyev, is on RSF’s list of press freedom predators.