Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that Ankara has paid a deposit on an arms deal with Moscow, estimated to be worth $2.5bn.

Ankara is set to purchase Russia’s S-400 missile system, Tayyip Erdogan said after his visit to Kazakhstan, according to Hurriyet newspaper.

Moscow says the S-400 system has a range of 400km. It can concurrently shoot down up to 80 targets, aiming two missiles at each target.

Russia deployed the missile system at its military base near Latakia in Syria in December 2015 after Turkish jets had shot down a Russian Su-24 warplane on the Syria-Turkey border.

However now, Turkish relations with Russian global rival US are starting to sour as a result of Turkey increasingly looking to Moscow and the Trump administration’s sanctioning of Turkish nationals for allegedly dealing with Iran.

Former Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan was accused of accused of laundering money on behalf of Iran.

Speaking to reporters in Istanbul on Friday, Erdogan condemned the “politically-motivated” move.

“These steps are purely political,” he said. “The United States needs to revise this decision, there are very unusual smells coming from this issue.”

But on Saturday US President Donald Trump and Erdogan agreed in a phone call to continue to work toward stronger ties and regional security, Erdogan’s office said this weekend.

The two leaders agreed to meet in New York at the United States General Assembly, scheduled for later this month.

(RFE/RL) — A series of anonymous bomb threats phoned to authorities in cities across Russia has prompted evacuations at schools, shopping malls, theaters, and universities since September 11.

Some regional media in Russia quote local police as saying the evacuations have been linked to drills, but other reports quote officials who have said the evacuations are the result of anonymous bomb threats.

Security officials reportedly have evacuated people from scores of buildings in Chelyabinsk, Magadan, Yekaterinburg, Stavropol, Ufa, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Ryazan, Bryansk, Perm, Krasnoyarsk, Vladivostok, and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.

Authorities in Perm canceled classes at schools across the city after anonymous callers phoned in bomb threats at the mayor’s office, seven schools, and a train station.

Reports from the Siberian city of Surgut say armed men in military uniforms have been stopping vehicles to carry out searches.

There was no official announcement from Russian security officials about the vehicle checks.

Moscow will bring the terms of work of its diplomatic missions in the US and those of Washington in Russia into “full parity,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced. The statement comes after the Russian Consulate in San Francisco and two trade missions in Washington, DC, and NYC were forced to close at the end of August.

Russian authorities, Lavrov said, asked the Americans to make sure the overall number of their diplomatic staff working in Russia equals that of the number of Russian diplomats working in the US.

“But in doing so, we included into that overall number everyone who work at the Russian mission in the UN,” Lavrov told reporters at a press conference in Amman, Jordan, on Monday.

“Understandably, this is a separate issue not relating to bilateral [US-Russia] relations.

“Nevertheless, doing so we showed our good will,” he continued. “The US has sort of pocketed our kind gesture and said ‘If Russians want parity, make them close one of four consulates [in the US] as we have only three consulates in Russia.’”

The US State Department insisted that the move was reciprocal to Moscow’s decision to cut the number of American diplomatic staff in Russia.

Lavrov added that Moscow is now looking at conditions under which the American diplomatic missions operate in Russia, and vice versa.

“If the US makes parity a criterion, we will bring those conditions in full accordance with what is called parity,” Lavrov said.

Last week, President Vladimir Putin also spoke of disparity between Russia and the US in the number of their diplomatic staff.

“We have agreed with our [American] partners that there should be parity of the number of diplomatic staff in Russia and the United States. There were some 1,300 diplomats from the US; we had 455. We corrected this,” Putin told journalists last Tuesday.

“But among those 455 diplomatic staff working in the United States there are 155 people working at the United Nations. Strictly speaking, they are not part of the diplomatic corps accredited by the US State Department,” he added.

“So true parity would be the US not having 455 diplomats in Russia, but 155 fewer.”

The lingering diplomatic row between Washington and Moscow began back in 2016, when the outgoing Obama administration expelled 35 Russian diplomats and closed two Russian diplomatic compounds in New York and Maryland. Notably, Moscow chose not to retaliate at the time, hoping to mend ties during Donald Trump’s presidency.

American lawmakers, however, limited Trump’s ability to formulate foreign policy towards Russia by barring him from easing sanctions on Russia without congressional approval.

In July, following the US Congress’ approval of new sanctions against Russia, Iran and North Korea in one package, Moscow cut the staff at American missions in Russia by 755 people. This brought the number to the same as Russian diplomatic staff in the US, which is 455 people.

In August, Washington announced in response that US consulates in Russia had halted issuing all non-immigrant visas for Russian citizens until further notice.

On August 31, on the Trump administration cited “the spirit of parity invoked by the Russians” and ordered the Russian Consulate in San Francisco, as well as two trade missions in Washington, DC, and New York City, to close. Moreover, FBI operatives conducted searches at Russia’s San Francisco Consulate.

The Russian Foreign Ministry vehemently opposed the closures, accusing operatives of the US security agencies that entered the Russian Consulate in San Francisco of “behaving like raiders.”

“Representatives of the US law enforcement agencies conduct unknown activities on the territory of the Russian Consulate General in San Francisco. They mutilate expensive parquet and do work without permission. Most importantly, nobody knows who these people are, who behave like raiders,” the ministry said.

Under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, premises of [any] diplomatic or consular mission “shall be inviolable” and “agents of the receiving State may not enter them, except with the consent of the head of the mission.”

The new dimension of Indo-Japan relation to global partnership and defence cooperation ignites new concern for China, after it was let down by the Doklam stand-off. China suspects the India-Japan partnership for Asia-Africa-Growth-Corridor project ( AAGR) is a ruse and has deciphered it as an attempt to counterbalance to China’s OBOR (One Belt One Road), displaying the fear of double standard of the aim.

Eventually, AAGR will overlap the OBOR route geographically. The Global Times – a English version of China’s official media – jeered at the connectivity, saying “ AACG – connectivity project jointly forged by India and Japan — is an oppositional vision intended to counterbalance China’s Belt and Road initiative”. It threatened the connectivity will backfire since China has made a huge commitment to develop Africa and India is at the pre-natal stage.

Sino–Japan relations are deteriorating and Sino-India relation are not palatable either. Against these backdrops, a new dimension in India-Japan relations is being eyed by a wary China with regard to its prestigious OBOR project. Neither Japan, nor India, are members of OBOR.

India–Japan relations are in the throes of new dynamism with a paradigm shift from a bare bilateral trade and investment link to special strategic and global partnership. It extended to joint partnership for economic development of third countries and defence cooperation. Development of AAGR project, joint cooperation for development of Chabahar Port in Iran, strengthening of defence cooperation for national security with Memorandum of Understanding on Defence cooperation and Exchanges and two Defence Framework agreements exhibit the dynamism of the relation in global partnership and defence coopearation.

The new dimension of India-Japan relations are polarized on three pillars. First, is High Speed Railway, with the setting up of first Bullet Train in the country connecting Mumbai and Ahmedabad. Second, security and defence cooperation through various exercises, such as trilateral Malabar drills with India-Japan-USA and a reiteration of commitment for the maintenance of peace in South China sea.

Third, joint cooperation with Japanese technical know-how to manufacture US-2 aircraft in India, in addition to import the US-2 amphibian aircraft from Japan.

The Prime Minster of India, Mr Modi, is trying to re-write a new chapter in India- Japan relations with a shift from a strategic economic relation to a global partnership. He reiterated that India and Japan were the two oldest democracies in Asia and were among the three biggest economies. He asserted that 21st Century is to be decided by Asian countries and India and Japan bilateral relation would be the engine for 21st Century growth. Mr. Modi is one of the three twitters that Mr Shinzo Abe follows. The commentators have hailed Modi as “India’s Abe.”

Japan is the third biggest foreign investor in India. Decrying the Japanese investment surge, Chinese media, Global Times said, “Japan can’t replace products from China in India ‘s low income consumer market”.

Paradoxically, last year Japanese investment in India spurred and 110 Japanese apparel firms in China went bankrupt, leading to a dip in Japanese investment in China.

The Chinese rant on Abe’s upcoming visit that “sweet words won’t bring real money” is dissipated with by increase in Japanese investment in India.

Even though 110 Japanese apparel companies pulled down their shutters of garment manufacturing and shifted to Vietnam and Myanmar to offset high cost manufacturing in China, implying that these two nations are most cost effective manufacturing destinations for Japanese investors. But, these shifts do not epitomize the two Asian nations having edge over India in low cost manufacturing competitiveness in all sectors

In 2015, Toshiba and Panasonic announced that they would stop producing television sets in China. These reflected the Japanese frustrations in China and underscored the trend of Japanese exit from the country.

“Any loss to China is a gain to India” is a new catchphrase. India poses potent to alternative destination for low cost manufacturing. According to a Deloitte survey in 2016, India will be the “New China” in low cost manufacturing countries in next five years. India will rise to 5th rank in the global manufacturing competitiveness index in 2020 from 11th position in 2016, the survey said. With China losing the powerhouse of low cost manufacturing competitiveness, five Asia Pacific nations will emerge the choice for low cost manufacturing destinations in place of China. They are Malaysia , Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and India. India will be the front-runner, the survey said.

Evidently, while Japanese investment in major Asian nations witnessed a downturn, investment in India surged. In between 2014 and 2016, Japanese investment in China , Hong Kong and Thailand fell – by 21 percent, 36 percent and 27 percent respectively. On the contrary, Japanese investment in India surged. In between 2014 to 2016, Japanese investment in India rose by 53 percent. Besides foreign direct investment, Japanese deployed huge amount of investment in private equity and venture capital in India. During the first half of 2017, Japanese firms invested at least US $1.43 billion in Indian private equity and venture capital. This was three times more than US $459 million in 2016, according to a Japanese media, Japan Times.

Thus, the contagion impact of China’s let down in Doklam stand-off and dynamism of Indo-Japan relation will act double whammy to China’s political and economic influence in Asia region through OBOR.

Views are personal

Various scribbles have started to pepper the conversation started by the adventurous Mike Pompeo after he branded WikiLeaks a hostile intelligence agency before the Center for Strategic and International Studies. (This would have generated a wry smile of content from Julian Assange.)

The words of the Central Intelligence Agency chief are worth retelling in their mind distorting wonder: “It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia.”[1]

Individuals like Assange and Edward Snowden receive the necessary special treatment as history’s great turncoats: “As long as they make a splash, they care nothing about the lives they put at risk or the damage they cause to national security.” Celebrity disrupters, dangerous irritants, narcissists in pursuit of personal glory.

This wretchedly desperate sentiment – for its nothing else – has wound its way into Congressional ponderings. Prior to the August District Work Period, the Senate Intelligence Committee took up Pompeo’s views, slotting into the Senate Intelligence Authorization Act (SB 1761) some suggestive wording: “It is the sense of Congress that WikiLeaks and the senior leadership of WikiLeaks resembles a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such a service by the United States.”[2]

This inventive provision passed 14-1, the only demurral coming from Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon. To The Hill, Wyden explained that “the use of the novel phrase ‘non-state intelligence service’ may have legal, constitutional, and policy implications, particularly should it be applied to journalists inquiring about secrets.”[3] And what, he feared, of the “unstated course of action” against those sinister non-state hostile intelligence services?

Responses to the provision have varied. Patrick G. Eddington of the Cato Institute was less than rosy about WikiLeaks, suggesting that such “Sense of Congress” provisions are pure “legislative puffery” lacking legal force, at least as far as Assange is concerned. “To claim otherwise trivializes the real threats that actual investigative journalists and their news organizations face from the US government.”[4]

Forget the Assange obsession, Eddington suggests to the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, and focus on dragging out the rotten apples, those “real problems and real bad actors inside the American Intelligence Community”. Eddington evidently forgets that such rotten fruit can have establishment camouflage.

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi takes the wording of the clause more seriously, seeing it as a form of justification to ground an action against WikiLeaks. But another expansive outcome could just as well ensue, empowering “federal law enforcement agencies to go after legitimate media outlets that obtain and publish classified information regarded as critical or even damaging to government policies.”[5] (Giraldi shares with Eddington a common trait of not regarding WikiLeaks as a legitimate media outlet. Such is the nature of backhanded praise.)

This sort of legislative interference is far from unusual. Australia’s own parliament, whose laws originally supplied no means or facility to prosecute Assange or WikiLeaks activities over US material per se, did pass what was tantamount to a “WikiLeaks amendment” in 2011.

To understand the amendment, it is worth looking at the political contortions adopted by the Australia prime minister of the period, Julia Gillard. Rather than considering the legal improbabilities at hand, she openly called the publishing of US cables “a grossly irresponsible thing to do and an illegal thing to do”, a point at odds with the finding by the Australian Federal Police that nothing unlawful had happened – at least in the Australian context.[6]

“The AFP has completed its evaluation of the material available,” came its statement in December 2010, “and has not established the existence of any criminal offences where Australia would have jurisdiction.”

A year later, the Intelligence Services Legislative Amendment Bill 2011 made its way through the drafting process. It seemed innocuous, a sort of laundry list of inoffensive provisions. But one crucial change mattered: the tinkering of the term “foreign intelligence” in the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979.

The original definition was a narrower one, making foreign intelligence relevant to covering “capabilities, intentions or activities” of foreign governments, entities controlled by the same or foreign political organisations. The current definition draws the tent outwards to the “capabilities, intentions or activities of people or organisations outside Australia.”

Such a change should have sent the political classes into a furious state. But it passed with barely a murmur, only ruffling the Australian Greens concerned that it might arrogate too much power to ASIO.

So soporific was the debate that some senators never bothered to turn up. Few, it seemed, had read the submission by law academic Patrick Emerton to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee. It reads as a sober warning to legislative overstretch, a parliamentary gift to bureaucratic paranoia: “The amendments would permit ASIO to investigate a far wider range of individuals and organisations, even where Australia’s defence interests and international relations are not at stake.”[7]

Legislative sloppiness, congressional warnings, and the ignorant passage of statutes – these point to business as usual, the wood of unwary representatives. But they also suggest a serious program at work: the targeting and punishment, not merely of whistleblowers, but the outlets that disseminate their findings. That much can be said for such legislative puffery.

Notes:
[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/discussion-national-security-cia-director-mike-pompeo

[2] https://www.congress.gov/115/bills/s1761/BILLS-115s1761pcs.xml

[3] http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/347555-wyden-voted-against-intel-authorization-over-wikileaks-denouncement

[4] https://www.cato.org/blog/wikileaks-hostile-intelligence-service-some-claim

[5] http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-u-s-congress-declaring-war-on-wikileaks/

[6] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-12-17/wikileaks-broke-no-australian-laws/2378342

[7] https://www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/140604/intel-services-legislation-amend-bill.pdf

Global warming could reduce coffee growing areas in Latin America — the world’s largest coffee-producing region — by as much as 88 percent by 2050.

That’s a key takeaway of the first major study of climate change’s projected impacts on coffee, and the bees that help coffee to grow. The findings appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“Coffee is one of the most valuable commodities on earth, and needs a suitable climate and pollinating bees to produce well,” said Taylor Ricketts, director of the University of Vermont’s (UVM) Gund Institute for Environment and study co-author. “This is the first study to show how both will likely change under global warming – in ways that will hit coffee producers hard.”

While other research has explored climate-coffee scenarios, no other study has explored the coupled effects of climate change on coffee and bees at the national or continental scale. The study forecasts much greater losses of coffee regions than previous global assessments, with the largest declines projected in Nicaragua, Honduras and Venezuela.

“Coffee provides the main income for millions of the rural poor, so yield declines would affect the livelihoods of those already vulnerable people,” said Ricketts, who is also a professor in UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.

While the research suggests coffee suitability and bee populations will decline in Latin America, it does offer some good news. The scientists projected a slight increase in coffee suitability in Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia and Costa Rica, mainly in mountainous areas where temperatures are expected to support coffee growing and more robust bee populations.

The study also identified future coffee regions where the number and diversity of bees are likely to increase. This could boost coffee productivity regionally, offsetting some negative climate impacts, the researchers said.

“If there are bees in the coffee plots, they are very efficient and very good at pollinating, so productivity increases and also berry weight,” said lead author Pablo Imbach of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). “In the areas projected to lose coffee suitability, we wanted to know whether that loss could be offset by bees.”

The study highlights the importance of tropical forests, which are key habitats for wild bees and other pollinators. While 91 percent of the most suitable area for coffee in Latin America is currently within a mile of tropical forests, that is projected to increase to 97 percent by 2050, meaning conservation of those habitats will be crucial.

“We hope the models we have created to make these projections can help to target appropriate management practices such as forest conservation, shade adjustment and crop rotation,” said Lee Hannah, senior scientist at Conservation International and a co-author of the study.

The study was conducted with advanced modelling, spatial analysis and field data. It provides strategies to improve coffee growth and bee pollination for Latin American coffee farmers:

1. Increase bee habitats near coffee farms where bee diversity is expected to decrease.
2. Prioritize farming practices that reduce climate impacts on coffee production where bees are thriving, but where coffee suitability will decline.
3. Protect forests and maintain shade trees, windbreaks, live fences, weed strips, and native plants that provide food, nesting and other materials to support pollinators.

War was not an activity exclusive to males in the Viking world. A new study conducted by researchers at Stockholm and Uppsala Universities shows that women could be found in the higher ranks at the battlefield.

Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, who led the study, explains: “What we have studied was not a Valkyrie from the sagas but a real life military leader, that happens to be a woman”.

The study was conducted on one of the most iconic graves from the Viking Age. It holds the remains of a warrior surrounded by weapons, including a sword, armour-piercing arrows, and two horses. There were also a full set of gaming pieces and a gaming board. “The gaming set indicates that she was an officer”, says Charlotte, “someone who worked with tactics and strategy and could lead troops in battle”. The warrior was buried in the Viking town of Birka during the mid-10th century. Isotope analyses confirm an itinerant life style, well in tune with the martial society that dominated 8th to 10th century northern Europe.

Anna Kjellström, who also participated in the study, has taken an interest in the burial previously. “The morphology of some skeletal traits strongly suggests that she was a woman, but this has been the type specimen for a Viking warrior for over a century why we needed to confirm the sex in any way we could.”

And this is why the archaeologists turned to genetics, to retrieve a molecular sex identification based on X and Y chromosomes. Such analyses can be quite useful according to Maja Krezwinska: “Using ancient DNA for sex identification is useful when working with children for example, but can also help to resolve controversial cases such as this one”. Maja was thus able to confirm the morphological sex identification with the presence of X chromosomes but the lack of a Y chromosome.

Jan Storå, who holds the senior position on this study, reflects over the history of the material: “This burial was excavated in the 1880ies and has served as a model of a professional Viking warrior ever since. Especially, the grave-goods cemented an interpretation for over a century”. It was just assumed she was a man through all these years. “The utilization of new techniques, methods, but also renewed critical perspectives, again, shows the research potential and scientific value of our museum collections”.

The study is a part of the ongoing ATLAS project, which is a joint effort by Stockholm University and Uppsala University, supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences) and Vetenskapsrådet (The Swedish Research Council), to investigate the genetic history of Scandinavia.

The program controls how and when brain genes are expressed at different times in a person’s life to perform a range of functions, the study found.

Experts say the timing is so precise that they can tell the age of a person by looking at the genes that are expressed in a sample of brain tissue.

Scientists analyzed existing data which measured gene expression in brain tissue samples from across the human lifespan – from development in the womb up to 78 years of age.

They found the timing of when different genes are expressed follows a strict pattern across the lifespan.

Most of the changes in gene expression in the brain were completed by middle-age, the study found.

The gene program is delayed slightly in women compared with men, suggesting that the female brain ages more slowly than the male.

The biggest reorganization of genes occurs during young adulthood, peaking around age 26, the team found. These changes affected the same genes that are associated with schizophrenia.

The team said this could explain why people with schizophrenia do not show symptoms until young adulthood, even though the genetic changes responsible for the condition are present from birth.

The study found the genetic programme is present in mice too, although it changes more rapidly across their shorter lifespan. This suggests that the calendar of brain aging is shared between all mammals and may be millions of years old.

Researchers next plan to study how the genetic program is controlled, which could lead to therapies that alter the course of brain aging, the scientists said.

It could also hold clues to new treatments for schizophrenia and other mental health problems in young adults.

The research, published in the journal eLife, was funded by the Medical Research Council, Wellcome Trust and the European Union Seventh Framework Programme.

Professor Seth Grant, Head of the Genes to Cognition Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh, said: “The discovery of this genetic program opens up a completely new way to understand behaviour and brain diseases throughout life.”

Dr Nathan Skene, Research Scientist at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, said: “Many people believe our brain simply wears out as we age. But our study suggests that brain aging is strictly controlled by our genes.”

By Najia Houssari

An award-winning film director was released without charge on Monday after he was arrested at Beirut airport and ordered to appear before a military court.

Ziad Doueiri, 53, was accused of illegally visiting Israel. Security officials at the airport confiscated his French and Lebanese passports when he arrived from France on Sunday.

The director is in Beirut for the premiere on Tuesday of his new movie “The Insult,” which goes on general release in Lebanon on Thursday.

He was ordered to appear before the court after pro-Hezbollah media accused him of visiting Israel in 2012 to shoot an earlier movie, “The Attack.” Lebanon is officially at war with Israel and its citizens are not permitted to travel there.

Military prosecutor Judge Saqr Saqr told Arab News: “After interrogating him, I saw that he has no connections with Israel and Doueiri’s movie serves the Palestinian cause. He was released after being granted a residence permit, and the case was dismissed.”

The prosecutor pointed out that, in any case, the visit took place in 2012, and any offense would have expired after five years under the statute of limitations.

Outside the court, Doueiri said his mother “breastfed me the Palestinian cause.

Members of my family were killed while fighting with the Palestinians against Israel, so I cannot be accused of dealing with the Israeli enemy.

“The movie ‘The Insult’ that will be released this week in Beirut has met legal standards. It is powerful and delivers a strong message. Maybe some people in Lebanon did not like its message. Let the Lebanese society watch it and decide.”

Doueiri’s lawyer said: “My client was released without charge. All the media hassle was just a storm in a tea cup. We have full trust in Judge Saqr.”

“The Insult” represented Lebanon at the Venice Film Festival, where one of its stars, the Palestinian actor Kamel El-Basha, was awarded the Volpi Cup for best actor. The movie has also been selected by the Ministry of Culture to represent Lebanon at the next Academy Awards.

Culture Minister Ghattas Khoury tweeted: “Ziad Doueiri is a great Lebanese director who has been honored around the world. Respecting and honoring him is a must.”

The Lebanese Forces party condemned the “vicious campaign against Lebanese-French director Ziad Doueiri that accused him of dealing with the enemy; this campaign aims to restrict political and cultural freedoms in Lebanon.

“The resentful campaign aims to attack the movie that objectively depicts what really happened during the Lebanese war.”

The party said Doueiri was “not an agent and his name is an added value for Lebanon, however, some of those who are still living in the 60s and 70s of the last century cannot and should not assess people and attack them.”

The earlier movie, “The Attack,” is about an Israeli surgeon of Arab origin whose wife is the perpetrator of a suicide attack in Tel Aviv. The story was adapted from a novel by Yasmina Khadra, which sold more than 550,000 copies and was translated into 40 languages.

The film caused a stir at the time of its release because the Boycott Office, a specialized bureau of the Arab League, had asked for it to be banned.

Doueri is best known for his 1998 movie “West Beirut,” which won the Prix Francois Chalais at that year’s Cannes Film Festival.

By Robert Kelley*

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea) conducted its sixth nuclear test on 3 September 2017. Preliminary estimates of yield are in the range of 100 to 150 kilotons (kt), although this figure will be subject to revision over a period of weeks. In the end, the degree of uncertainty is likely to be tens of kilotons. Some observers are jumping to the conclusion that this latest test had to be a thermonuclear test (so-called hydrogen bomb). However, this assessment is mostly based on seismic data, which has its limitations.

In contrast, radioactive debris, collected in the air shortly after a test can give unequivocal evidence of whether the test used plutonium or uranium as the fissile fuel. Debris also gives clear evidence of successful true thermonuclear enhancement using lithium and hydrogen isotopes. However, North Korea has spent a great deal of effort to conceal its actual nuclear test results, other than the seismic yield which cannot be concealed. It has had success in preventing the release of radioactive isotopes by carefully sealing the test tunnels in earlier tests (i.e. tests two to five), and thus hampering data collection.

North Korea claimed to have tested a hydrogen bomb in 2016. While it leaked photographs of an alleged fission bomb, North Korea prevented Western scientists from getting the data they needed to verify the claims. Asserting that it now possesses a thermonuclear capability, North Korea has this week released images of what is purported to be a two-stage weapon in the presence of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un. These photographs show details that are consistent with future thermonuclear warheads for long-range missiles, but they are not necessarily the actual state-of-the-art.

It is true that a 100-kt yield is easily achievable in an underground test without any thermonuclear reaction whatsoever. The 1952 Ivy–King event in the US nuclear test program reportedly gave 500-kt yield without any thermonuclear reactions. In fact, a 100-kt yield in an underground test, where size and weight are no constraint, is much easier than designing a so-called miniature warhead with a 10- to 20-kt yield. From seismic yield alone, there is no way to judge whether North Korea’s most recent test was a fission-only test or a test using thermonuclear reactions. Unless radioactive debris is collected, North Korea’s claims will have to be taken seriously in the absence of real data.

Without a doubt, North Korea has tested some type of nuclear explosive. But testing underground with strong containment makes it very difficult to accurately judge the true nature of the test. Was it a thermonuclear device or a large, simple fission device? In the absence of significant amounts of radioactive fission products, which are needed for exact verification, the jury is still out.

About the author:
*Robert Kelley is an Associate Senior Research Fellow within the SIPRI Nuclear Weapons Project, Arms Control and Non-proliferation Programme.

Source:
This article was published at SIPRI.

By Tate Fegley*

Policing in America has been a contentious issue, especially since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Many different explanations have been extended as to why confrontations between the police and citizens so often become lethal: racism, poor training, availability of firearms to civilians, etc. As such, “solutions” to the problem target these issues. However, the ideas of Ludwig von Mises regarding economic calculation, despite being developed almost a century ago, offer far more interesting, and potentially more fruitful, insight into the matter of policing in a free society.

Mises’s argument was that without private property in the means of production, there can be no market prices for capital goods and therefore no way of calculating the opportunity costs of using capital goods to produce certain goods instead of others. The decisions of central planners of what to produce and by what means would be arbitrary and chaotic.

Because government policing is provided bureaucratically, without market prices and profit and loss, there is no way for police to know whether they have allocated resources to their most highly valued uses. Instead of consumers determining what problems police focus on, bureaucrats and politicians decide.

Three days prior to the death of Eric Garner, who died shortly after his arrest for selling untaxed cigarettes, New York governor Cuomo’s website bragged about how much revenue his Cigarette Strike Force had generated. It is highly doubtful that the citizens of New York demanded that the NYPD allocate resources to tobacco tax enforcement.

Just like everyone else, police respond to incentives. According to economist Bruce Benson, the War on Drugs did not really start to escalate into what we know it as today until Congress passed the 1984 Crime Control Act, allowing police to take a cut of the revenue from drug crime through civil asset forfeiture. Benson found in Florida, as did many others replicating his study elsewhere, that when police allocate more resources to drug enforcement, they use fewer resources to defend property, and property crime goes up.

This is not to argue that government police allocate resources solely based on financial considerations, but that when economic calculation is impossible, allocation decisions must be made by some other means, and that means will typically reflect the desires of the bureaucrat, as far as his autonomy allows. But even if we assume the best of intentions on the part of the police and bureaucrats, the calculation problem remains. They are unable to weigh the value of patrolling the roads against dispersing aggressive panhandlers or investigating a burglary. Because they earn no revenue on the market, they are unable to calculate whether the value of the services they provide is greater than the resources expended in producing them.

Contrast this with security in the private sector, where entrepreneurs can calculate the return of an additional unit of security personnel (such as by the reduction in theft compared to what it was before he was hired) against its cost. Entrepreneurs in the market are much more able to calculate the optimal amount of security. Additionally, they more efficiently allocate heterogeneous, non-specific inputs, such as labor, to more highly valued uses than do government police departments. For example, although the “rent-a-cop” is derided as a low-wage, unintimidating farce, the fact that they pass the market test demonstrates that they provide greater benefit than their cost. Differentiation in skills is underutilized by police departments, who use expensive sworn officers to perform low-skilled duties, such as coordinating traffic at intersections.

Moreover, issues of police aggression and its desirability can be thought of as calculation problems. Some will argue that police need qualified immunity, which protects them from civil liability, so that they will not be hesitant to use force when necessary. Others respond that this encourages police to use more force than is actually needed. Not being able to calculate the value of more aggressive policing, government police are in the dark. However, entrepreneurs providing security in the market, being civilly liable for damages their employees cause, will strive to find the balance between aggressive policing and minimizing civil liability that consumers desire. To a degree far greater than government police, private companies face real consequences from consumers when they use force unnecessarily, as United Airlines is coming to realize.

Thus, to fully understand the issues in contemporary American policing, the economic calculation problems facing it must be appreciated. When consumers are not sovereign in deciding where resources are allocated, government bureaucrats are. Since police do not have to satisfy consumer preferences in order to stay in business, we should not be surprised that they treat us like subordinates rather than the other way around.

About the author:
* Tate Fegley was a 2016 Mises Institute Fellow. He is currently a graduate student at George Mason University. Contact Tate Fegley

Source:
This article was published at the MISES Institute.

Germany’s Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen at a Defense Ministers’ summit in Estonia on September 7, criticized the upcoming Russian-Belarusian Zapad 2017 military exercises. She said that around 100,000 Russian soldiers will take part in the upcoming Zapad 2017 war games, despite Moscow’s claims that they will only have 12,700 participants and the exercise will not exceed the 2011 Vienna Document limits.

Moscow and Minsk also insist on defensive character of the exercise. Two countries that constitute the Union State of Russia and Belarus pre-declared intention to improve interoperability of staffs of different levels as well as interfacing of prospective troops and armament control systems in order to be prepared to react adequately to emerging threats.

The statement of Germany’s Minister of Defense fully contradicts these official sources and was likely made in order to divert attention from internal problems in the German Army and switch it to external factors.

Is Germany itself really ready to cope with rapidly changing geopolitical situation? This question should logically be addressed to the country’s Minister of Defense Ursula von der Leyen. According to the European commission’s report “Standard Eurobarometer 87”, trust in the German Army has significantly fallen. The level of trust is only 66%. This dubious achievement is on the conscience of the Minister.

Ursula von der Leyen has been taking this post since December 2013. Undoubtedly she recognized that her main goal was to make German Armed Forces stronger, instill confidence and relieve fears in German society. But permanent scandals associated with German Army have led to the opposite effect. First of all she has not managed to win respect among troops and civil society. Von der Leyen repeatedly harshly criticized national Armed Forces for military leadership failures, attitude problems and for tolerating rightwing extremists, as well as sexual abuse cases. “The Bundeswehr has an attitude problem, and they have weaknesses in leadership at different levels,” she said.

German soldiers in their turn reacted angrily, accusing her of collectively tarring them while failing to take responsibility herself.

The experts wonder why the head of Defense Ministry, instead of clarifying each incident and substantiating her accusations against the military leadership, on the contrary, spoils the relations between the Army and politicians. And they are really far from ideal. This opinion was expressed by the head of the Bundeswehr association, André Wüstner. Mr. Wüstner. He told the daily Augsburger Allgemeine: “Nobody can understand how a minister can cast such judgement on her own troops.”

Ms. von der Leyen realizes that there are so many problems accumulated in defense sphere that she has no choice but to act, even make unproven statements. Such behavior discredits the State. Providing false information the high-ranking official shows Berlin’s fear of Moscow that is absolutely obnoxiously for Germans. Perhaps she is very close to being the next to leave her post with scandal as many of her predecessors did.

By Kazi Anwarul Masud

In May 1949 Albert Einstein wrote an article titled WHY SOCIALISM? It gave indeed an insight into the philosophy of life of one the greatest human beings of the 20th century. At the end of the article Einstein declares: “I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society”.

The “evils” to Einstein is the monopolization of productive forces by a few oligopolists who have lost “inner equilibrium” who are at the same time a solitary being and also a social being craving for the love and recognition of other human beings in society. “ The individual” writes Einstein “is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society”.

Yet some in the society constitute a huge community of producers who are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules which are, even today, controlled by the elites who either directly or indirectly contribute to the framing of the rules. We have to remember that Albert Einstein in the thirties of the last century abhorred the wage given to the workers who had nothing to sell but themselves not determined by the real value of the goods he produced but by his needs and the employers bargaining power with the hordes of unemployed people willing to do the job at the minimum wage the employer agreed to pay. In Einstein’s words: the enormous power of the oligarchy is because “the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population”.

How 1949 Einstein’s world is any different from ours when he describes “Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers’ goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions”.

A decade earlier Bertrand Russell In praise of idleness and other essays (1935), a self-proclaimed socialist, did not regard “Socialism as a gospel of proletarian revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race”. While Bertrand Russell in defining socialism wanted economic power- as a minimum, land and minerals, capital, banking, credit and foreign trade-but political power should be democratic. Russell argued that since without popular consent production would only enrich the State and not the people their consent in a democratic manner was essential. Though it is taken for granted that exercise of voting is an integral part of British life as most recently demonstrated by Brexit which has put the European Union into a very difficult negotiation process with Britain. This contest between the EU and United Kingdom is not a battle of ideologies but one of getting the best deal for their citizens.

The world has got so used to democracy that we have forgotten that economic development is not necessarily dictated by democracy. China is an example, already the second largest economy in the world, aiming to best the US in the coming decades. Chinese economic development would get comfort from Hobbes’ (1558-1679) that democracy is inferior to monarchy and that neither the people nor the politicians are well equipped to chart out the best legislation for the benefit of the people. “Many public choice theorists in contemporary economic thought expand on these Hobbesian criticisms. They argue that citizens are not informed about politics and that they are often apathetic, which makes room for special interests to control the behavior of politicians and use the state for their own limited purposes all the while spreading the costs to everyone else. Some of them argue for giving over near complete control over society to the market, on the grounds that more extensive democracy tends to produce serious economic inefficiencies”( Stanford Encyclopedia on democracy).

In the Indian sub-continent socialism came hand in hand with the independence movement from the British rule. Mahatma Gandhi called himself a socialist so long it was practised with non-violence. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first Prime Minister also believed in socialism. But educated as he was in England his brand of socialism was more akin to the Fabian Socialism “to promote greater equality of power, wealth and opportunity; the value of collective action and public service; an accountable, tolerant and active democracy; citizenship, liberty and human rights; sustainable development; and multilateral international cooperation” (Wikipedia). He detested Nazism and Fascism because they believed in brutality and violence and caused the Second World War. Whether Nehruvian socialism was a success story is a different issue. In fact till Dr. Manmohan Singh as Finance Minister in 1991 and then as Prime Minister for ten years propelled India to 8.5% economic growth. This fast economic growth perhaps led President George Bush to offer India a seat in the nuclear club, ending nuclear apartheid and also persuaded Barrack Obama to promise US support to India for a UN Security Council seat.

Today Indian economy is booming, though demonetization (refuted by the government) might have slowed the pace of development. GDP (purchasing power parity) is estimated to be $8.7 trillion in 2016; growth rate is 7.6%; per capita income is $ 6700(PPP)-in GDP composition services sector leads followed by industries and agriculture. Irfan Habib, Professor Emeritus of Aligarh Muslim University in a lecture states: “It must be recognised that India is now a full-blooded capitalist country. The urban population now nearly equals, and by the Census of 2021 would probably exceed, the rural population. Peasants produce only about a sixth of gross domestic product, and much of peasant agriculture is influenced by capitalist relations, as in many areas ploughs and scythes have been replaced by tractors and harvesters employed on hire. The key industrial and communications sectors are dominated by great semi-monopolistic firms with deep links to international finance capital” ( Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust Lecture on August 22 2017).

The basic premise with which this article started with was the growth model that countries like Bangladesh should follow to achieve middle income country status by 2021. Is the mixed economy model now being followed will take us there or the capital intensive policy that will inevitably lead to concentration of wealth in few hands and increase inequality if demographic dividend cannot be utilised by producing a techsavy workers capable to handle the demands of the foreign investors? The assumption is that the future world will be technology based making a large portion of humanity redundant bringing about a refined scenario of Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

The world does not have to be Planet of the Apes. China, Japan and South Korea have demonstrated that rapid industrialisation and export oriented policies coupled with technological development can bring about “convergence” phenomenon—a tendency for less developed countries to catch up with developed economies because rich countries have faster diminishing returns than the less developed ones. India too is a shining example.

In conclusion we should target to achieve sustainable development goals, prevent extreme concentration of wealth in too few hands, and ensure that benefits of development is fairly distributed among all the people so socialism does not become a question or an answer.

By H. H. S. Viswanathan

In a historic judgment for Kenya and Africa, the country’s Supreme Court annulled on September 1 the results of the August 8 presidential election in which the current incumbent Uhuru Kenyatta was declared the winner by a margin of 1.4 million votes out of around 15 million cast. This development has been hailed as a rare success for the independence of judiciary in Africa. After his defeat, the opposition candidate Raila Odinga had filed a petition with the Supreme Court alleging fraud in the polls. Four of the six judges in the bench ruled that the August election was “invalid, null and void.” Chief Justice David Maraga remarked that “taking the totality of the entire evidence, we are satisfied that the elections were not conducted in accordance to the dictates of the Constitution.” It is a serious indictment of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC).

The Supreme Court actually questioned the procedural aspects of whether the polls met the constitutional requirements. It did not go into the question of whether the irregularities made a substantial difference to the result that was announced. It is also significant that the court did not attribute any blame to President Kenyatta’s party or the campaign. The court has also ordered fresh polls to be held within 60 days.

The court verdict had an immediate effect on the economy. In a few hours, the Nairobi Stock Exchange Index fell by 4% and has continued to decline. The Kenyan Shilling has lost 3% against the US Dollar.

Tense situation

Post electoral violence is very common in Kenya. After Odinga’s defeat in the 2007 polls, ethnic violence between his Luo tribe and Kenyatta’s Kikuyu tribe led to the death of 1400 people. Cases against many political leaders for Crimes against Humanity were initiated in the International Court of Justice. Luckily, this time around, the violence was at a much lower level with the loss of only about 20 lives.

The electoral process in Africa has improved significantly in the last two decades. Governments have changed due to elections. However, it is quite normal for the defeated candidate not to concede on charges of fraud. To be fair to them, there have been instances of fraud in some cases. Post electoral violence is still a major worry for many African countries.

The new Constitution of 2010 was a game changer for Kenya. This gave more independence to the Courts which began to exercise it with enthusiasm. Odinga, after his defeat in the 2013 polls, had again moved the court for electoral fraud. However, it did not oblige him then and upheld the election.

Irregularities in the transmission of results

The court ruling says that IEBC committed irregularities in the “transmission of results.” There appears to be serious discrepancies between the figures of manual votes polled and the computer figures. Further, Kenyatta was declared winner before the scanned copies of the official tally forms were uploaded online. These factors gave Odinga enough ammunition to file the petition. To add to conspiracy theories, there was the mysterious murder of Chris Msando, the IEBC Electronic Director a few days before the Aug 8 poll. An enquiry is on but it will be sometime before the truth comes out.

The reactions to the Supreme Court ruling have been on expected lines. Odinga and his supporters welcomed the decision and celebrated. Kenyatta said “I disagree with the ruling, but I respect it.” He also asked his supporters to be calm and maintain peace.

An embarrassment for the International Monitors

International Observers have been a regular feature in most African elections. At the August 8 poll also there were International Monitors from EU, AU and the US. They had given a clean chit to the poll. They had remarked that “the ballot appeared to be free, fair and credible.” The team included former US Secretary of State John Kerry who, in fact, praised the work of the IEBC. The Supreme Court ruling must have embarrassed them a great deal. There has naturally been no reaction to the court decision from any of the monitors so far. They can, however, still argue that the procedural errors would not have changed the result.

What happens now?

The new situation raises many questions and concerns. Firstly, can the IEBC reorganize itself to conduct fresh polls which will satisfy the stringent conditions of the Supreme Court? If not, will the court intervene again? The time for organizing the new poll is very short, particularly because the full judgement has still not been made public yet. IEBC has, in the meantime, announced 17 October as the date for the fresh poll without any consultation with the opposition parties. Odinga has already rejected the date. Further, he has laid down conditions for participation like sacking of top officials of IEBC including its Chief Executive Ezra Chiloba and a full audit of the Commission’s IT systems.

Secondly, one has also to look at the cost of the exercise. For the August 8 elections, the Kenyan government had spent US $ 480 million. A similar amount has to be earmarked for the repeat poll. There are also other costs involved. Millions of Kenyans in urban areas will have to travel again to their home villages for voting.

Thirdly, will the results of the new poll satisfy the two opposing candidates? That is to say, if Kenyatta loses, will he step down? And if Odinga loses, will he concede? A lot of uncertainty seems to loom large on the Kenyan political scene. One only hopes that irrespective of what happens, there will be no major violence among the various ethnic groups.

ISIS’ strategy of claiming responsibility for any terrorist-like attack increases the complexities and challenges of dealing with single-actor (lone-wolf) attacks. Responses at the macro and micro levels will, invariably, be just as complex.

By Damien D. Cheong*

Several single-actor or lone-wolf attacks over the last 12 months seemingly bear the hallmarks of ISIS. The attacks in Manila (June 2017), Ohio State University (November 2016), Hamburg (October 2016), and Orlando Nightclub (June 2016) were initially thought to be ISIS-inspired. However, while ISIS did claim responsibility for them, investigations revealed that the perpetrators had no apparent or formal affiliation with the group.

Of late, ISIS’ strategy has been to claim responsibility for any terrorist-like attack (whether single-actor or group) regardless of whether they were actually involved. The group’s eagerness to do so can be attributed to its weakened position in Iraq/Syria where military efforts to wrest territory from its control are ongoing. In order to project resilience and strength, ISIS claims credit for attacks to remind supporters and adversaries that it is still a force to be reckoned with. The group also hopes to encourage further global attacks as well as feed propaganda efforts.

Why this Matters

This development is significant as it can potentially motivate individuals who are not ISIS agents/supporters but afflicted with some form of mental illness to carry out single-actor (lone-wolf) attacks. Individuals who are not inclined towards religiously-inspired violent extremism but want to kill for whatever reason are firstly, assured of prominence/fame via the media attention as well as ISIS’s claim that he/she belongs to the group (i.e. “a soldier of the Islamic State”).

Secondly, they will be able to legitimise their attacks internally as they will perceive that the killing is ultimately for a higher cause. Finally, the attack no matter how minor (e.g., a stabbing) will be given prominence as it will be framed as a terror attack rather than as an ordinary crime.

This state of affairs is due in part to the way terrorist attacks are framed by the media. The media have, traditionally, treated terrorist attacks as ‘exceptional’. This is partly because the act(s) of violence has a political purpose and is designed to exert pressure on governments and their people. In the case of mass murders, the act(s) of violence is often carried out to fulfil a personal objective.

The attacker is also treated differently. A ‘terrorist’ is usually characterised as a violent extremist who knows exactly what he/she is doing, whereas a ‘mass murderer’ is often portrayed as mentally unstable and not entirely aware of his/her actions. As a consequence of such framing, terrorist attacks are able to garner more media attention than homicides.

National Security Implications

At the micro level, how we think of the single-actor (lone-wolf) attacker invariably changes. In addition to focusing on individuals who are at risk of being radicalised by extremist ideology, attention should also be paid to individuals who suffer from mental illness and have a propensity for violence.

Empirical studies have shown that “the odds of a lone-actor terrorist having a mental illness is 13.49 times higher than the odds of a group actor having a mental illness”, and that single actor/lone wolf terrorists with mental illness are capable of planning sophisticated attacks and rational thought. The Chattanooga attack in the United States in July 2015, and the Sydney Siege in 2014 are historical cases in point.

The most challenging part is, of course, determining the triggers that push the individual to act violently. These triggers need not be set-off by an individual such as a radical preacher, but simply through aggrievement, feelings of injustice resulting from news about victimisation/persecution of a particular ethnic or religious group, perceptions about absence or ineffectiveness of global responses and so on.

At the macro level, social cohesion can be undermined if the perception that all terrorist-like attacks are the result of violent religious extremists takes root. This is because it not only increases the risks of Islamophobia but also bolsters far-right sentiments/ideology as well, which could legitimise attacks against particular religious or ethnic groups.

For example, the university student who shot and killed six worshippers at a Quebec mosque in January 2017, was “known for far-right, nationalist views”. Similarly, the perpetrator of the vehicular attack on the Finsbury Park mosque in June 2017 was motivated by anti-Muslim sentiments (the attacker was also alleged to be suffering from mental illness, which, ironically, underscores the earlier point).

Responses

Due to the inability to know precisely when an individual will act violently, an effective micro level response is early detection of behavioural anomalies in the potential attacker by friends, colleagues or family. Canada’s Centre for the Prevention of Radicalisation Leading to Violence’s (CPRLV) lists: “justifying the use of violence to promote a cause, ideology, or militant agenda”; “breaking ties with friends and family”; “a significant change in the regular expression of emotions”; “adopting an intransigent worldview that leaves no room for dialogue”; “searching for a sense of identity and belonging”, among others, as key tell-tale signs that an individual is growing more unstable.

While such behavioural indicators are useful, the challenge is whether people will report their loved ones or colleagues when they notice these behavioural changes in him/her. Reporting naturally elicits apprehension in the one making the report.

A major fear is that the reported person will ultimately be punished. However, this is not necessarily the case as assistance rather than chastisement is the goal of such preventive involvement. Seeking the assistance of mental health professionals and/or secular or religious counsellors is paramount at this stage.

By attempting to reduce the number of single-actor attacks via preventive involvement, macro level efforts to deal with Islamophobia and creeping far-right ideology will invariably be enhanced. It will give gravitas to inter-racial and religious harmony efforts by reassuring the public that all groups are doing what is necessary, however uncomfortable, to keep the community safe.

*Damien D. Cheong is a Research Fellow at the National Security Studies Programme (NSSP), a constituent unit of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

An analysis of flood claims in several southeast Houston suburbs from 1999-2009 found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s 100-year flood plain maps — the tool that US officials use to determine both flood risk and insurance premiums — failed to capture 75 percent of flood damages from five serious floods, none of which reached the threshold of a 100-year event.

The research by hydrologists and land-use experts at Rice University and Texas A&M University at Galveston was published in the journal Natural Hazards Review just days before Hurricane/Tropical Storm Harvey inundated the Houston region and caused some of the most catastrophic flooding in U.S. history.

“The takeaway from this study, which was borne out in Harvey, is that many losses occur in areas outside FEMA’s 100-year flood plain,” said study co-author Antonia Sebastian, a research associate at Rice’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center and a postdoctoral researcher at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

“What we’ve tried to show, both with this study and several others, is that it is possible to do better,” said lead author Russell Blessing, a Texas A&M-Galveston graduate student with joint appointments at the SSPEED Center and Texas A&M-Galveston’s Center for Texas Beaches and Shores. “There are innovative computational and hydrological tools available to build more predictive maps.”

In the new study, Blessing, Sebastian and co-author Sam Brody, a professor of marine sciences at Texas A&M-Galveston, director of the Center for Texas Beaches and Shores and a SSPEED Center investigator, examined the Armand Bayou watershed in southeast Harris County. Armand Bayou’s 60-square-mile watershed includes portions of Houston, Pasadena, Deer Park, La Porte and Taylor Lake Village, as well as unincorporated portions of Harris County.

Five major rain events occurred in the study area between 1999-2009. They were Hurricane Ike (2008), Tropical Storms Erin (2007) and Allison (2001, and two rainstorms that caused flooding in 2006 and 2009.

Hydrologists often characterize rain events and flooding events with a statistic known as “return interval.” A 100-year flood has a 100-year return interval, but Blessing said that does not mean such a storm is only expected to occur every 100 years. Rather, it means there is a 1-in-100 chance, or a 1 percent chance, that the event will occur in any given year. Thus, a 50-year event would have a 2 percent chance of occurring each year, a 10-year event would have a 10 percent chance, and so on.

Brody said one problem with FEMA’s 100-year flood plain maps is that they assume that flooding will only take place in one dimension, that is, either downstream or upstream, and not perpendicular to the channel.

“That assumption doesn’t hold when you’re in really low-lying areas, like Armand Bayou or other coastal watersheds that are very flat,” he said. “When flooding rain accumulates in these areas, it can flow in just about any direction depending upon how high it gets.”

Another issue with FEMA’s maps is their lack of granularity. Brody and Blessing said the type of soil (such as clay versus sand) and the way land is used (such as a concrete parking lot or a school playground) have significant impacts on flooding, and FEMA’s models often use a single classification for entire neighborhoods or groups of neighborhoods. In so doing, they miss out on small-scale features that can significantly affect flooding.

Sebastian said focusing on 100-year events is also problematic because short, intense rainfall events that don’t meet the 100-year threshold can still cause serious flooding.

“In Armand Bayou, a 100-year rainfall event is one that drops 13.5 inches of rain in a 24-hour period,” she said. “In reality, we also experience much more intense rainfalls in less time. So, for example, when it rains 6 inches in two or three hours, it can also cause serious flooding.”

In several other studies, including a number that examined flooding in the Clear Creek watershed, Blessing, Brody, Sebastian and SSPEED colleagues have shown that other approaches, like distributed hydrologic modeling and probabilistic flood plain mapping, can be far more predictive of flood damages and flood risk.

A kauri tree preserved in a New Zealand peat swamp for 30,000 years has revealed a new mechanism that may explain how temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere spiked several degrees centigrade in just a few decades during the last global ice age.

Unexpectedly, according to new research led by scientists from UNSW Sydney and published today in Nature Communications, it looks like the origin of this warming may lie half-a-world away, in Antarctica.

Rapid warming spikes of this kind during glacial periods, called Dansgaard-Oeschger events, are well known to climate researchers. They are linked to a phenomenon known as the “bipolar seesaw”, where increasing temperatures in the Arctic happen at the same time as cooling over the Antarctic, and vice versa.

Until now, these divergences in temperature at the opposite ends of the Earth were believed to have been driven by changes in the North Atlantic, causing deep ocean currents, often referred to as the ocean “conveyor belt”, to shut down. This led to warming in the Northern Hemisphere and cooling in the south.

But the study, which examines a specific Dansgaard-Oeschger event that occurred around 30,000 years ago, suggests Antarctica plays a role too.

The paper describes how the researchers used a detailed sequence of radiocarbon dates from an ancient New Zealand kauri tree to precisely align ice, marine and sediment records across a period of greatly changing climate.

“Intriguingly, we found that the spike in temperature preserved in the Greenland ice core corresponded with a 400-year-long surface cooling period in the Southern Ocean and a major retreat of Antarctic ice,” said lead author and UNSW scientist Professor Chris Turney.

“As we looked more closely for the cause of this opposite response we found that there were no changes to the global ocean circulation during the Antarctic cooling event that could explain the warming in the North Atlantic. There had to be another cause.”

A clue to what might be going on if the oceans weren’t involved appeared in lake sediments from the Atherton Tableland, Queensland. The sediments showed a simultaneous collapse of rain-bearing trade winds over tropical northeast Australia.

It was a curious change, so the researchers turned to climate models to see if these climate events might somehow be linked.

They started by modelling the release of large volumes of freshwater into the Southern Ocean, exactly as would happen with rapid ice retreat around the Antarctic.

Consistent with the data, they found that there was cooling in the Southern Ocean but no change in the global ocean circulation.

They also found that the freshwater pulse caused rapid warming in the tropical Pacific. This in turn led to changes to the atmospheric circulation that went on to trigger sharply higher temperatures over the North Atlantic and the collapse of rain-bearing winds over tropical Australia.

Essentially, the model showed the formation of a 20,000 km long “atmospheric bridge” that linked melting ice in Antarctica to rapid atmospheric warming in the North Atlantic.

“Our study shows just how important Antarctica’s ice is to the climate of the rest of the world and reveals how rapid melting of the ice here can affect us all. This is something we need to be acutely aware of in a warming world,” Professor Turney said.

It also showed how deeply the climate was linked across great distances said fellow author and climate modeller from the University of Tasmania, Dr Steven Phipps.

“Our research has revealed yet another remarkable example of the interconnections that are so much a part of our climate system,” Dr Phipps said.

“By combining past records of past events with climate modelling, we see how a change in one region can have major climatic impacts at the opposite ends of the Earth.”

(RFE/RL) — Ads that Russian operatives purchased on Facebook during last year’s presidential election actively promoted then-Republican candidate Donald Trump’s anti-immigration campaign and other conservative causes, U.S. media are reporting.

Most of the ads were deleted by Facebook, which said last week that it had suspended accounts it found were linked to Russian organizations that were advertising on political issues such as immigration and LGBT matters during the campaign.

But BuzzFeed said it retrieved some of the ads placed by a “notorious St. Petersburg troll factory” that was posing as a Facebook community called SecuredBorders, and found they actively promoted Trump and his platform while mocking and denouncing Trump’s liberal opponents.

One of the ads cited by BuzzFeed promoted Trump’s repeated claim that over 5 million illegal migrants may have voted during the 2008 election, and called on Facebook readers to “like” the ad if they agreed such illegal voting was unacceptable.

Another ad BuzzFeed said it retrieved asked readers to “like if you agree” with Trump’s decision, once he won the presidency, to end the long tradition of celebrating the end of the Muslim holiday Ramadan at the White House.

Other ads promoted Trump’s signature proposal to build a border wall between the United States and Mexico, and depicted illegal immigrants from Latin America as rapists and criminals — a charge frequently made by Trump during his campaign for the White House.

Reuters reported one SecuredBorders advertisement promoted an anti-immigrant rally in the U.S. state of Idaho in August 2016, three months before the November election, and around 48 people on Facebook expressed an interest in attending, with four saying they went, according to a copy of the event page archived by Google’s search engine.

In light of the discovery of the ads actively promoting Trump causes, the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington nonprofit group that advocates for more transparency in elections, said on September 12 that it sent a letter to Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg asking the company to publicly release the content of the alleged Russia-linked political ads.

“Releasing those advertisements could allow the country to better understand the nature and extent of foreign interference with our democracy,” the center’s president, Trevor Potter, wrote.

Facebook said in response to the letter: “Federal law and ongoing investigations limit what we can share publicly,” Reuters reported.

The company said it has turned over information about the ads to the Justice Department and congressional committees which are investigating Russia’s alleged interference in the election.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray has announced his resignation after a fifth man came forward to accuse him of sexual abuse. The mayor has denied accusations that he repeatedly molested his 13-year-old cousin decades ago.

In a statement released Tuesday, Murray adamantly denied the allegations, but said his resignation would be “best for the city.”

“While the allegations against me are not true, it is important that my personal issues do not affect the ability of our City government to conduct the public’s business,” Murray said, adding that he was proud of the work he had accomplished during his time as a legislator.

Murray’s resignation came shortly after the Seattle Times reported Tuesday that Joseph Dyer, 54, Murray’s first cousin accused the mayor of repeatedly molesting him when he was 13 years old.

“There would be times when I would fake sleeping because I didn’t want him touching me,” Dyer, told the Times. “And that’s when he would molest me. And my mother would be right there in the house, she’d be in the living room… watching TV, at that time it was probably ‘M*A*S*H.’ And my sisters would be in their rooms, sleeping. And I would be in my room, and he would be in there, molesting me.”

Murray, 62, confirmed that he did share a room with Dyer in the ‘70’s. Murray and his siblings came to live with Dyer and his mother, Maryellen Sottile, in New York after their mother died. Dyer was 13 at the time while Murray was in his early twenties.

Murray denied the allegations, which he said were fabricated to get back at him for previous clashes between the families.

“I did not sexually abuse any of her children,” Murray told the Times. “There’s been numerous fights between our two families for many years, and much ugliness. I guess they see me down and out, and they want to finish me off.”

Dyer told the Times he was motivated to come forward after he saw Murray deny previous allegations.

“I saw… clips of (Murray) denying what he did, that pissed me off to the point where I am like, ‘That’s it. I have had enough.’ I have been carrying this around for 40-some years. Something has got to be done.”

Sottile also told the Times that she was “very glad to hear that he’s resigned,” adding that she hopes it will help others.

Lloyd Anderson, who accused Murray of paying him for sex when he was a teenager, said that he felt “victory” after Murray announced his resignation, but also felt “saddened that it required another victim to come forward for him to resign.”

“I wonder how many other victims are out there,” Anderson said, according to a statement obtained by the Times.

Murray previously ended his bid for a second term after the initial accusations were made. However, he had support to finish his term until the most recent allegations were reported Tuesday.

Mayoral candidate Jenny Durkan, who previously accepted Murray’s endorsement, released a statement Tuesday that said his decision to resign was “in everybody’s best interest.”

“As a parent, former public official and openly gay woman, these allegations are beyond sad and tragic; no official is above the law,” Durkan said.

Rival candidate Cary Moon, who has repeatedly called for Murray to step down in the wake of previous allegations, called his response “inappropriate and harmful, especially to survivors, LGBTQ people and young people everywhere.”

“Survivors of sexual assault must be believed and treated with respect,” Moon said in a statement. “It’s terribly difficult for victims to speak up publicly. How many victims will it take for the Mayor to step down?”

Murray was first accused of sexual abuse in April, when Delvon Heckard, 46, filed a lawsuit accusing the mayor of paying him for sex more than 50 times when he was 15 years old.

Murray said that his resignation would be effective Wednesday at 5:00pm, at which point City Council President Bruce Harrell would take over as mayor. Harrell has five days to decide whether to fill out the rest of Murray’s term which ends on December 31.

In a statement obtained by KONG, Harrell said he intends to make an announcement within five days, after he consults with his family and other members of the Seattle City Council.

“The City must focus on governance and day-to-day business without distraction,” Harrell said. “I have a plan in place for a seamless transition in order for City operations to continue at the highest standard. Seattleites deserve a government that holds their full confidence and trust.”

China’s global geopolitical aspirations, backed by growing economic clout, shape the direction and character of its military-technological choices and China’s strategic interest to strengthen its position in global arms markets.

By Michael Raska*

Over the past decade, China has been able to accelerate its transition from a large arms importer to a major exporter, with a potential to become one of the world’s leading arms exporters, by providing low cost and affordable service and upgrade packages without geopolitical strings.

According to recent data by SIPRI, the Stockholm-based think-tank, Chinese exports of major arms have increased by 74 percent between 2012 and 2016, and its share of global arms exports rose from 3.8 to 6.2 percent, making it the world’s third-largest supplier in the world, after the United States and Russia. The geographic spread and number of recipients of Chinese weapons exports have also increased. In 2012-16, China delivered major arms to 44 countries – more than 60 percent of China’s exports went to Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar and another 22 percent went to Africa. China also delivered major arms to ex-Soviet states for the first time, including the 2016 delivery of surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems HQ9 (FD-2000) to Turkmenistan.

Chinese Weapons Catalogue

Meanwhile, China has become less dependent on arms imports, which decreased by 11 percent during 2012–16. While China was the largest importer globally by a wide margin in the early-2000s, it dropped to fourth place in 2012–16. In this context, however, China remains dependent on imports of key weapons systems and advanced components, including aerospace engines such as the Russian Al-31FN and RD-33 engines used on the J-10 and FC-1 fighters, respectively. From 2012-16, for example, aircraft engines accounted for 30 percent of China’s arms imports, delivered from Russia (57 percent), Ukraine (16 percent), and France (15 percent).

China’s increasing presence on global arms markets inherently reflects the relative progress of the Chinese defence, science, technology, innovation, and industrial base in terms of developing, manufacturing new, relatively advanced military platforms and technologies.China has aimed to catch-up with the global military-technological state-of-the-art base by fostering indigenous innovation, mitigate foreign dependencies on technological transfers and arms imports, while leveraging civil-military integration to overcome entrenched barriers to innovation.

As a result, the catalogue of Chinese-made arms offered for exports, particularly in areas such as aerospace, have made significant progress relative to the archaic offerings of the late-1990s. China introduced two fourth-generation fighters into mass production stage – the FC-1/JF-17 (developed jointly with Pakistan) and the J-10.

It increased its presence on international aerospace and defence markets, promoting its new combat trainers, fifth-generation fighter (J-31), missile systems (anti-ship, anti-tank, and man-portable), SAMs (HQ-9), radars, transport aircraft (MA60, Y-20), helicopters, UAVs, new versions of the Type 90 tank (VT-3, VT-4, VT-5), a new generation of light armoured vehicles (VN-4), self-propelled and towed artillery, multiple rocket launchers, trucks, ships (Type 053, 054A, 056), and submarines (S26T/Type 039A).

Strategic Positioning

By narrowing the technological gaps with leading Russian and Western suppliers, China has been able to enter new markets with new generation military technologies, including Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Nigeria, Kenya, Thailand, Indonesia, and Kazakhstan.

In doing so, China’s current arms export strategy reflects varying ‘competitive’ paths. In the developing countries of Latin America, Africa, and even Central Asia, China is trying to position itself as an alternative to Russian arms exports, while counterbalancing the influence of Western powers. Chinese defense contractors compete on price, while providing greater flexibility when negotiating the financial terms of arms contracts.

At the same time, however, China is using arms exports as an instrument of its foreign policy to project power and influence to create strategic dependencies in areas that are vital to China’s interests, for example in Southeast Asia. For example, China’s recent major arms exports contracts with Thailand (S26T submarines) and military assistance to the Philippines may in the long-term disrupt traditional strategic linkages with the United States. In a reverse mode, countries in the region may seek Chinese defense contracts to solidify security and economic ties with China.

Regional Arms Competition

In East Asia, these trends accelerate regional “arms competition,” characterised by incremental, often near-continuous, improvements of existing capabilities, as well as in a mix of cooperative and competitive pressures, continued purchases of advanced weapon platforms, including the introduction of new types of arms and, therefore, unprecedented military capabilities.

On one hand, China’s defence industrial capabilities enable the People’s Liberation Army to accelerate its transformation into a fully ‘informatised’ fighting force – one capable of conducting sustained joint operations, military operations other than war, and missions related to China’s strategic deterrence to protect China’s core national security interests beyond national borders.

Parallel, China has a growing capability to shape the direction and character of the arms competition – not only through its military-technological development and diffusion of its arms exports, but more importantly, through its strategic choices that influence the contours of strategic alliances and balance of power in different geographic areas.

Consequently, the ongoing struggle for dominance by the region’s two major powers (China and Japan); the future of the Korean Peninsula; intra-regional competition in territorial disputes in the East China Sea and South China Sea; and perhaps most importantly, the contours of long-term regional strategic competition and rivalry between China and the United States, will be inherently shaped by attendant consequences of China’s defence industrial strategies and arms exports that are increasingly aligned with Beijing’s geopolitical and economic aspirations.

*Michael Raska is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, a constituent unit of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.