MIT engineers have devised a 3-D printing technique that uses a new kind of ink made from genetically programmed living cells.

The cells are engineered to light up in response to a variety of stimuli. When mixed with a slurry of hydrogel and nutrients, the cells can be printed, layer by layer, to form three-dimensional, interactive structures and devices.

The team has then demonstrated its technique by printing a “living tattoo” — a thin, transparent patch patterned with live bacteria cells in the shape of a tree. Each branch of the tree is lined with cells sensitive to a different chemical or molecular compound. When the patch is adhered to skin that has been exposed to the same compounds, corresponding regions of the tree light up in response.

The researchers, led by Xuanhe Zhao, the Noyce Career Development Professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Timothy Lu, associate professor of biological engineering and of electrical engineering and computer science, say that their technique can be used to fabricate “active” materials for wearable sensors and interactive displays. Such materials can be patterned with live cells engineered to sense environmental chemicals and pollutants as well as changes in pH and temperature.

What’s more, the team developed a model to predict the interactions between cells within a given 3-D-printed structure, under a variety of conditions. The team says researchers can use the model as a guide in designing responsive living materials.

Zhao, Lu, and their colleagues have published their results today in the journal Advanced Materials. The paper’s co-authors are graduate students Xinyue Liu, Hyunwoo Yuk, Shaoting Lin, German Alberto Parada, Tzu-Chieh Tang, Eléonore Tham, and postdoc Cesar de la Fuente-Nunez.

A hardy alternative

In recent years, scientists have explored a variety of responsive materials as the basis for 3D-printed inks. For instance, scientists have used inks made from temperature-sensitive polymers to print heat-responsive shape-shifting objects. Others have printed photoactivated structures from polymers that shrink and stretch in response to light.

Zhao’s team, working with bioengineers in Lu’s lab, realized that live cells might also serve as responsive materials for 3D-printed inks, particularly as they can be genetically engineered to respond to a variety of stimuli. The researchers are not the first to consider 3-D printing genetically engineered cells; others have attempted to do so using live mammalian cells, but with little success.

“It turns out those cells were dying during the printing process, because mammalian cells are basically lipid bilayer balloons,” Yuk said. “They are too weak, and they easily rupture.”

Instead, the team identified a hardier cell type in bacteria. Bacterial cells have tough cell walls that are able to survive relatively harsh conditions, such as the forces applied to ink as it is pushed through a printer’s nozzle. Furthermore, bacteria, unlike mammalian cells, are compatible with most hydrogels — gel-like materials that are made from a mix of mostly water and a bit of polymer. The group found that hydrogels can provide an aqueous environment that can support living bacteria.

The researchers carried out a screening test to identify the type of hydrogel that would best host bacterial cells. After an extensive search, a hydrogel with pluronic acid was found to be the most compatible material. The hydrogel also exhibited an ideal consistency for 3-D printing.

“This hydrogel has ideal flow characteristics for printing through a nozzle,” Zhao said. “It’s like squeezing out toothpaste. You need [the ink] to flow out of a nozzle like toothpaste, and it can maintain its shape after it’s printed.”

From tattoos to living computers

Lu provided the team with bacterial cells engineered to light up in response to a variety of chemical stimuli. The researchers then came up with a recipe for their 3-D ink, using a combination of bacteria, hydrogel, and nutrients to sustain the cells and maintain their functionality.

“We found this new ink formula works very well and can print at a high resolution of about 30 micrometers per feature,” Zhao said. “That means each line we print contains only a few cells. We can also print relatively large-scale structures, measuring several centimeters.”

They printed the ink using a custom 3-D printer that they built using standard elements combined with fixtures they machined themselves. To demonstrate the technique, the team printed a pattern of hydrogel with cells in the shape of a tree on an elastomer layer. After printing, they solidified, or cured, the patch by exposing it to ultraviolet radiation. They then adhere the transparent elastomer layer with the living patterns on it, to skin.

To test the patch, the researchers smeared several chemical compounds onto the back of a test subject’s hand, then pressed the hydrogel patch over the exposed skin. Over several hours, branches of the patch’s tree lit up when bacteria sensed their corresponding chemical stimuli.

The researchers also engineered bacteria to communicate with each other; for instance they programmed some cells to light up only when they receive a certain signal from another cell. To test this type of communication in a 3-D structure, they printed a thin sheet of hydrogel filaments with “input,” or signal-producing bacteria and chemicals, overlaid with another layer of filaments of an “output,” or signal-receiving bacteria. They found the output filaments lit up only when they overlapped and received input signals from corresponding bacteria .

Yuk says in the future, researchers may use the team’s technique to print “living computers” — structures with multiple types of cells that communicate with each other, passing signals back and forth, much like transistors on a microchip.

“This is very future work, but we expect to be able to print living computational platforms that could be wearable,” Yuk said.

For more near-term applications, the researchers are aiming to fabricate customized sensors, in the form of flexible patches and stickers that could be engineered to detect a variety of chemical and molecular compounds. They also envision their technique may be used to manufacture drug capsules and surgical implants, containing cells engineered produce compounds such as glucose, to be released therapeutically over time.

“We can use bacterial cells like workers in a 3-D factory,” Liu said. “They can be engineered to produce drugs within a 3-D scaffold, and applications should not be confined to epidermal devices. As long as the fabrication method and approach are viable, applications such as implants and ingestibles should be possible.”

By Konradus Epa

Leaders of hard-line Islamic groups in Indonesia have called on Muslims to only vote for co-religionists in elections for public office.

The rationale was that not electing non-Muslims would improve the implementation of Islamic teachings.

On Dec. 2 about 40,000 Muslims from Jakarta and West Java gathered to commemorate a rally held a year ago targeting former Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a Christian also known as Ahok.

Ahok was sentenced to two years in prison for blasphemy after challenging claims that the Quran required Muslims to be led only by fellow Muslims.

He essentially claimed that the Quranic verse at the center of the row was misinterpreted by his Muslim electoral opponents.

The Dec. 2 commemorative rally was coordinated by various Muslim groups including the Islamic Defenders Front, which claims 7 million members.

The aim was to promote Muslim leaders ahead of 2018 provincial, district and municipal elections as well as a presidential election due in 2019.

Various speakers called on voters to seek advice from Muslim clerics before casting ballots.

“Now Indonesia is in need of more Islamic leaders from national to regional levels, who can defend Islam and make sure that Islamic teachings are applied,” Ahmad Sobri Lubis, chairman of the Islamic Defenders Front, told ucanews.com after the event.

“We don’t want people like Ahok to lead.”

However, some radical Muslims have criticized Indonesian President Joko Widodo for targeting groups who are religiously intolerant, including by banning the militant Hizbut Tahrir group.

Slamet Ma’arif, a coordinator of the 2016 anti-Ahok rally, also expressed frustration with the present government, even though a Muslim leads it.

“Muslims have been fragmented and only good Muslim leaders can unite them, by putting forward Islamic teaching,” he said.

“I believe that can overcome the nation’s problems.”

Meanwhile, Islamic Defenders Front fugitive leader Muhammad Rizieq Shihab, who has been in exile in Saudi Arabia since Indonesian police named him as a primary suspect in a sex scandal, could only greet his supporters via a video teleconference.

“Let’s fight for an Indonesia that is based on sharia,” he said when referring to Islamic law that can entail severe punishments for perceived wrongdoing.

“That’s the only way to save the country and protect its religions from blasphemy and harassment.”

Mitha Aulia, 23, a former member of dissolved Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, said she joined the rally because she was disappointed with Widodo for disbanding her group.

“I’m here to show concern that Indonesia is in desperate need of a leader who can unite all Muslims,” she told ucanews.com.

However, Mafud, 21, a Muslim student who participated in the rally, said not all Muslims agreed with the calls to elect only Muslim leaders.

“We need leaders who can advance Indonesia, no matter what religion he belongs to,” he said.

Bonie Hargens, a political analyst at the University of Indonesia, said the rally on Dec.2 was politically motivated to target Widodo.

“After Ahok, now they aim for President Joko Widodo,” he said, adding that their calling on Muslims to vote only for Muslim leaders is their right.

“This is a democratic country,” he said.

“They are welcome to determine their own candidates or even to establish a political party.”

By Carl Bunderson

Despite the recent inclusion of Pope Francis’ 2016 letter to the Buenos Aires bishops on Amoris laetitia in the Holy See’s official text of record, neither the Church’s discipline nor its doctrine have changed.

The move is the latest in the debate over the admission of the divorced-and-remarried to Communion. The Second Vatican Council, St. John Paul II, and Benedict XVI – as well as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts under them – all firmly opposed proposals to admit to eucharistic communion the divorced-and-remarried who do not observe continence.

The debate has received renewed impetus under Pope Francis. His 2016 apostolic exhortation on love in the family, Amoris laetitia, has been met with varied reception and interpretation within the Church. Its eighth chapter, entitled “Accompanying, Discerning, and Integrating Weakness,” deals with, among other things, the pastoral care of the divorced-and-remarried, those who may not be admitted to Communion unless they have committed to living in continence, eschewing the acts proper to married couples.

Yet, for many Church leaders and theologians, ambiguous language in that chapter has led to uncertainties about this practice, and about the nature and status of the apostolic exhortation itself. Some have maintained that it is incompatible with Church teaching, and others that it has not changed the Church’s discipline. Still others read Amoris laetitia as opening the way to a new pastoral practice, or even as a development in continuity with St. John Paul II.

Some Church leaders have noted that Amoris laetitia has led to the disorientation and great confusion of many of the faithful, and at least one respected theologian has argued that Francis’ pontificate has fostered confusion, diminished the importance of doctrine in the Church’s life, and cause faithful Catholics to lose confidence in the papacy.

Pope Francis has been understood to encourage those who interpret Amoris laetitia as opening the way to a new pastoral practice – as he seemed to do in a letter to the bishops of the Buenos Aires region, which is the subject of the latest furor.

His letter approves those bishops’ pastoral response to the divorced-and-remarried, based on Amoris laetitia. The response had said that ministry to the divorced-and-remarried must never create confusion about Church teaching and the indissolubility of marriage, but may also allow access to the sacraments under specific limits. These might include specific situations when a penitent in an irregular union is under attenuated culpability, as when leaving such a union could cause harm to his children, although the circumstances envisioned are not precisely delineated, which, some theologians say, has contributed to the confusion.

The Pope’s Sept. 5, 2016 letter addressed to Bishop Sergio Alfredo Fenoy of San Miguel said, “The text is very good and makes fully explicit the meaning of the eighth chapter of ‘Amoris Laetitia’. There are no other interpretations. And I am sure it will do a lot of good. May the Lord reward you for this effort of pastoral charity.”

It was reported this weekend that Pope Francis’ letter, as well as the pastoral response of the Buenos Aires bishops, were promulgated in the October 2016 issue of the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, a Vatican publication in which official documents of the Pope and the Roman Curia are published, and through which universal ecclesiastical laws are promulgated.

Dr. Edward Peters, a professor of canon law at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, wrote Dec. 4 that the Buenos Aires document contains assertions “running the gamut from obviously true, through true-but-oddly-or-incompletely phrased, to a few that, while capable of being understood in an orthodox sense, are formulated in ways that lend themselves to heterodox understandings.”

He noted that what prevents the admission of the divorced-and-remarried to eucharistic communion is canon 915 “and the universal, unanimous interpretation which that legislative text, rooted as it is in divine law, has always received.” The canon states that those “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.”

In an August 2017 post anticipating the possible publication in AAS of the Buenos Aires letter or the Pope’s commendation of it, Peters had written that “many, nay most, papal documents appearing in the Acta carry no canonical or disciplinary force.”

He wrote that “Unless canon 915 itself is directly revoked, gutted, or neutered, it binds ministers of holy Communion to withhold that most august sacrament from, among others, divorced-and-remarried Catholics except where such couples live as brother-sister and without scandal to the community.”

“Nothing I have seen to date, including the appearance of the pope’s and Argentine bishops’ letters in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, makes me think that Canon 915 has suffered such a fate.”

He added: “Neither the pope’s letter to the Argentines, nor the Argentine bishops’ document, nor even Amoris laetitia so much as mentions Canon 915, let alone do these documents abrogate, obrogate, or authentically interpret this norm out of the Code of Canon Law.”

While the Pope’s letter and the Buenos Aires bishops’ pastoral response do contain ambiguous “disciplinary assertions”, they are insufficient “to revoke, modify, or otherwise obviate” canon 915, Peters wrote.

Aside from the canonical problems with the admission of the divorced-and-remarried to eucharistic communion is the question of what it means that the Buenos Aires document and the Pope’s letter in support of it are intended to be a part of the Church’s Magisterium.

A rescript from Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State, in the AAS notes that their promulgation was intended “as authentic Magisterium.”

The Magisterium is a part of teaching office of bishops, by which they are charged with interpreting and preserving the deposit of faith. In its 1990 declaration Donum veritatis, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith noted that the Magisterium “has the task of discerning, by means of judgments normative for the consciences of believers, those acts which in themselves conform to the demands of faith and foster their expression in life and those which, on the contrary, because intrinsically evil, are incompatible with such demands.”

Catholics are bound to assent to divinely revealed teachings with faith; to firmly embrace and retain those things which are required to safeguard reverently and to expound faithfully the deposit of faith; and to give religious submission of intellect and will to doctrines on faith or morals given through the authentic Magisterium.

The critical question regarding Amoris laetitia is what, precisely, it teaches with regard to faith and morals, and what it doesn’t, or even, can’t, teach. On the latter question, especially, the Church’s existent doctrine is helpful.

Even while some bishops, such as those of the Buenos Aires region and those of Malta, have interpreted the apostolic exhortation as allowing a new pastoral practice, many others have maintained that it changes nothing of doctrine or discipline.

For example, while prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Müller said that Amoris laetitia has not eliminated Church discipline on marriage, nor has it has permitted in some cases the divorced-and-remarried “to receive the Eucharist without the need to change their way of life.”

“This is a matter of a consolidated magisterial teaching, supported by scripture and founded on a doctrinal reason: the salvific harmony of the sacrament, the heart of the ‘culture of the bond’ that the Church lives.”

The prefect of the CDF said that if Pope Francis’ exhortation “had wanted to eliminate such a deeply rooted and significant discipline, it would have said so clearly and presented supporting reasons.”

“There is however no affirmation in this sense; nor does the Pope bring into question, at any time, the arguments presented by his predecessors, which are not based on the subjective culpability of our brothers, but rather on their visible, objective way of life, contrary to the words of Christ,” Cardinal Müller stated.

It has been the constant teaching of the Church that marriage is indissoluble, that people not married to each other may not legitimately engage in acts of sexual intimacy, that the Eucharist may not be received by those conscious of grave sin, and that absolution requires the purpose of amending one’s life, even with a diminished or limited capacity to exercise the will.

And the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “If the divorced are remarried civilly, they find themselves in a situation that objectively contravenes God’s law. Consequently, they cannot receive Eucharistic communion as long as this situation persists … Reconciliation through the sacrament of Penance can be granted only to those who have repented for having violated the sign of the covenant and of fidelity to Christ, and who are committed to living in complete continence.”

St. John Paul II promulgated the Catechism in 1992 by the apostolic constitution Fidei depositum, in which he wrote that it “is a statement of the Church’s faith and of Catholic doctrine, attested to or illumined by Sacred Scripture, Apostolic Tradition and the Church’s Magisterium. I declare it to be a valid and legitimate instrument for ecclesial communion and a sure norm for teaching the faith.”

“The approval and publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church represents a service which the Successor of Peter wishes to offer to the Holy Catholic Church … of supporting and confirming the faith of all the Lord Jesus’ disciples, as well as of strengthening the bonds of unity in the same apostolic faith. Therefore, I ask the Church’s Pastors and the Christian faithful to receive this catechism in a spirit of communion and to use it assiduously in fulfilling their mission of proclaiming the faith and calling people to the Gospel life. This catechism is given to them that it may be a sure and authentic reference text for teaching Catholic doctrine.”

Critical to understanding the character of the Church’s teaching on these issues is a declaration the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts wrote in 2000 that canon 915’s prohibition on admitting to Holy Communion those who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin is applicable to the divorced-and-remarried.

“Any interpretation of can. 915 that would set itself against the canon’s substantial content, as declared uninterruptedly by the Magisterium and by the discipline of the Church throughout the centuries, is clearly misleading,” it said.

This prohibition, the pontifical council continued, is “by its nature derived from divine law and transcends the domain of positive ecclesiastical laws: the latter cannot introduce legislative changes which would oppose the doctrine of the Church.”

This declaration defines a kind of a limit on how the Magisterium can develop; by invoking divine law, the council says that no pastoral approach can transgress the norms of Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. While considering questions of subjective culpability do not exceed those norms, the council’s directive explains that the Church can not, and will not, redefine the deposit of faith.

The deposit of faith has not been changed, and nor has canon law. Despite a great deal of anxiety and media attention, truth remains unchanged, and unchanging.

While some find the Pope’s writing to be ambiguous, truth is not. Amoris laetitia must be interpreted in a way that does not contravene truth.

Even when such an interpretation is not readily apparent.

y Dr Subhash Kapila

Indo Pacific Asia as a geopolitical conception replacing the earlier concept of Asia Pacific has evolved markedly since 2008-2009 synchronous with China’s switch from exercise of ‘Soft Power’ to ‘Hard Power’ in Chinese strategic formulations in its Asian strategies which since then singularly are characterised by aggressive military brinkmanship.

In the security formulations and regional and global debates, in response to China’s military aggression and brinkmanship from the High Himalayas to the South China Sea, the burgeoning China Threat to Asian security acquired a wider geopolitical dimension which necessitated encompassing the Pacific Theatre and the Indian Ocean Theatre as one joint security entity.

The Indo Pacific as a geopolitical construct was also a tribute to the growing salience of India not only as an ‘Emerged Power but also as a ‘Leading Power’ which with its existing power attributes and power potential was perceived as capable of playing a wider role in contributing to the security and stability of not only the Indian Subcontinent and the Indian Ocean Region but also as a significant player in the security and stability of the Western Pacific more specifically.

Continuing in the same vein, India was perceived in Asian capitals and by the United States as a vital existential counterweight to China hell-bent on challenging the existing security and stability templates prevailing in the Pacific and in Indian Ocean Region. More specifically, India was increasingly perceived and India also started perceiving itself as a regional provider of nett security.

The existing Asia Pacific security architecture basically revolved around the United States bilateral security treaties with Japan and South Korea and earlier with the Philippines too. It also rested on the nearly 40,000 each military presence of US Forces in Japan and South Korea as US Forward Military presence in the Western Pacific along with the US Seventh Fleet, the US Third Marine Expeditionary Force and sizeable US Air Force components deployed in Japan and South Korea. With the US Strategic Pivot to Asia Pacific in 2012 Guam has been built up sizeably as a major US Military Base in US Territory in the Pacific.

The prevailing US security architecture in the Western Pacific stood the test of time in acting as deterrence in the Cold War with the Former Soviet Union and later against a military rising China. However, China’s exponential military and strategic buildup, in particular naval buildup, in the last decade without a serious checkmating by the United States has diluted the United States deterrence in the Western Pacific visibly in end-2017.

China exploited the American preoccupations with Afghanistan and Iraq, the domestic political compulsions within the United States of sequestered defence budgets and the US obsession with a China-Hedging Strategy to indulge in aggression in the South China Sea against its smaller ASEAN neighbours and has now established sovereignty sway over this wide maritime expanse by constructing artificial islands which now house significant military facilities.

In the same period with the emergence of Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013 and in pursuance of his grandiose Great China Dream Chinese military confrontation and brinkmanship markedly increased along the Himalayan Borders of India with China Occupied Tibet and a concerted Chinese naval effort to challenge the status quo in the Indian Ocean dominated geopolitically by India.

More threateningly, China has aided and abetted in the emergence of North Korea and Pakistan as nuclear weapons powers with IRBM/ICBM missiles arsenal. With both North Korea and Pakistan as China’s nuclear proxy states at the command bidding of China’s dictates, Asian security and stability stand threatened.

In end-2017, Asian security extending from the Pacific to the Indian Subcontinent and Indian Ocean Region stands severely challenged by China and Chinese rogue nuclear proxy powers. The picture would have been different had Russia not opportunistically sided to give strength to a Cinna-Russia strategic nexus visibly endorsing China’s military aggressive brinkmanship in the Indo Pacific region.

In end-2017, this Communist and military authoritarian coalition led by China has no visible integrated matching coalition of Asian democracies to give some semblance of a formal security coalition so that Indo Pacific Asia ‘balance of power ‘is maintained and ensured.

The only regional grouping in the form of ASEAN with security contours has been effectively divided by China’s machinations and incapable of providing security and stability in the ASEAN region spanning both East Asia and South East Asia.

Revived evolution of the ‘Trilateral’ and the ‘Quadrilateral’ incorporating the United States, Japan , India and Australia is still in a nascent form, more as a muted response to China’s domineering sway -strategies for Indo Pacific Asia. These evolutions are intended to be superimposed on the existing US security architecture existent in the Asia Pacific

Contextually therefore security imperatives exist that an aggressive China which has already inflicted significant security turbulence from India to the South China Sea and all available indicators portend that China is likely to continue with its irresponsible streak of disruptive conflicts is counterbalanced by the formation of an “Indo Pacific Treaty Organisation”.

The proposed Indo Pacific Treaty Organisation (IPTO) needs to be organised and patterned on the lines of NATO which has stood the test of time even after the dissolution of the former Soviet Union.

The Cold War held the peace in Europe and never became a ‘Hot War’ simply because running across Central Europe were congealed lines of military confrontation of the two powerful military alliances facing each other, namely, NATO as the Western Alliance and the Warsaw Pact comprising the Former Soviet Union and its Eastern Europe Communist regimes.

Historically, military alliances between nations have been a natural consequence to ward off exiting or impending threats by rise of aggressive disruptionist powers. Such military alliances have been small or big but it encompassed a coalition of likeminded powers joining together in the cause of overall peace and stability.

The proposed security organisation for the Indo Pacific, that is IPTO, therefore needs to be viewed as an Asian security imperative whose time has come and any delay or diffidence in establishing it would amount to encourage more aggressive and conflictual inflictions on Indo Pacific security by a rising China. The formation of IPTO earlier stood delayed because of Asian reluctance for multilateral security organisations and also that in the past Asian collective security organisations failed to take off.

Formation of an IPTO earlier could also have been delayed by United States and Asian hopes that a rising China would emerge as a responsible stakeholder in Asian security. These pious hopes on China stand hopelessly belied on the verge of the third decade of the 21st Century.

In the past security organisations like SEATO were founded based on ideological confrontations. But in end-September 2017, it is not ideological imperatives that impel formation of IPTO but a shared concern of like-minded Asian countries in the Indo Pacific to ward off the potential China Threat generated by a Chinese President who has presided over the switch-over of Chin’s strategic formulations from exercise of ‘Soft Power’ to ‘Hard Power’ in pursuit of China’s bid for superpower stardom.

The proposed IPTO’s formation should be spearheaded by the United States, Japan, India and Australia who are already members of the Quad. United States is the unipolar Superpower, notwithstanding China-initiated propaganda that USA is a power on the decline. Russia and China comparatively, even when put together, are no match for United States global predominance.

Japan and India are now not only Emerged Powers but also recognised as ‘Leading Powers’ with comprehensive power potential to add significant strategic ballast to United States global predominance. Japan and India are Asian Powers in contention with China which aspires to establish hegemonic sway over the Indo Pacific.

Australia is the dominant power with continental dimensions dominating both South Pacific and Southern Indian Ocean. It has been an important player in South East Asia security for decades.

Put together all these Quad countries represent a significant counterweight to any Chinese military adventurism in Indo Pacific. With them as the core of IPTO many other important nations in Indo Pacific which have major concerns pertaining to China would be willing to join IPTO. Notably, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines are membership candidates for IPTO. One should not rule out Myanmar, Bangladesh and Afghanistan as potential members of IPTO.

Two questions come to the fore in relation to the formation of IPTO. The first, and on which many questions would be raised is whether IPTO when formed would have the potential to deter China’s military adventurism? Secondly, whether India would be a willing member of a multilateral security organisation going by its historical aversions?

Answering the first question, there are no reasons to believe that China will not be deterred by formation of IPTO. China has no alternative mechanisms to form a counter-balancing coalition in Asia on the lines of the Warsaw Pact. China’s only natural allies are North Korea and Pakistan perceived as rogue nuclear states. It is debatable whether Russia is going to join in any formal China-led coalition to counter-balance IPTO

China already betrays concerns on the growing strategic proximity of Japan and India to the United States and also opposes the evolution of the Quad.

Coming to the question of India’s readiness to join IPT, it needs to be considered that the India of the 21st Century is no longer weighed down by the Nehruvian shibboleths against strategic partnerships or forming part of a multilateral security or security-oriented organisation. If it had been otherwise then India would not have forged a significant US-India Strategic Partnership or re-joined consultations on the revival of the Quad. Both of these initiatives are implicitly catering for the rising China Threat.

India’s ‘Act East Policy” including joint naval exercises in the Western Pacific is nothing more than an assertive response to China’s increasing naval intrusiveness in the Indian Ocean. Participation by India in the multilateral naval exercises whether in the Western Pacific or the Indian Ocean is a sign of India’s counter-moves against the growing China Threat’s maritime dimensions?

More ominously, the emergence of military-predominant China-Pakistan Axis on India’s doorsteps should be an added catalyst for India to found and join a multilateral security organisation to counterbalance China’s decided threatening moves on the South Asian chequer-board.

The full ramifications of China’s geopolitical tussle with India on the wider Asian strategic chequer-board and the ramifications of the China-Pakistan Axis impinging on India’s security and national interests stand analysed in my last Book: ”China-India Military Confrontation: 21st Century Perspectives” That should be a wake-up call for India’s security establishment.

Since China in 21st Century’s second decade manifests by its actions both a continental land threat and a maritime threat in the Indo Pacific, the proposed composition of IPTO encompasses core security capabilities covering both continental and the maritime dimensions of the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean.

In Conclusion, the major points of consideration offered are as follows:

• The China Threat in the second decade of the 21st Century is a ‘live threat’ going by China’s demonstrated military brinkmanship in recent times in the South China Sea, the East China Sea and the Himalayan borders of India with China-Occupied Tibet.
• The China Threat stands manifested both in the continental dimensions and moreso in the maritime dimensions as China makes its grand strategic moves to emerge as a Superpower. Pursuance of this Great China Dream is likely to generate more Chinese military adventurism in Asia.
• The United States and its existent web of bilateral security relationships have been unable to deter China from its aggressive brinkmanship against its neighbours on its extended peripheries.
• The United States by itself, in the absence of a NATO-type multilateral security alliance, gets limited in its options and initiatives to counterbalance the China Threat. Asia needs a multilateral security organisation to cater for Asian security under threat.
• The forging of an “Indo Pacific Treat Organisation” therefore emerges as a strategic imperative in the second decade of the 21st Century to counterbalance the burgeoning China Threat and to ensure that China’s Hitlerian impulses are curtailed to avoid a similar catastrophe.

If NATO could hold the peace in Europe for more than half a century and even now, then there are no reasons to doubt that the formation of IPTO would not be able to ensure likewise in the Indo Pacific expanse.

Cancer Research UK scientists have discovered that testing skin cancer patients’ blood for tumour DNA could help predict the chances of an aggressive cancer returning.

Published in the Annals of Oncology* today (Wednesday), the findings could pave the way to identifying patients who are most at risk of their disease returning, and who might benefit from new immunotherapy treatments.

Led by researchers based at the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute and The Christie NHS Foundation Trust**, scientists studied blood samples taken after surgery from 161 patients*** with stage 2 and 3 melanoma. They then looked for faults in two genes that are linked to 70% of melanoma skin cancers – BRAF and NRAS.

After five years, 33% of patients who had a positive blood test for faults in either of the two genes were alive, compared to 65% of those who did not.

The results also revealed that skin cancer was much more likely to return within a year of surgery in patients who had faults in either of the two genes.

Each year around 15,400 people in the UK are diagnosed with malignant melanoma. And while survival has doubled in the last 40 years, around 2,500 people die from the disease every year in the UK.

Professor Richard Marais, lead researcher and director of the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, based at the University of Manchester, said: “For some patients with advanced melanoma, their cancer will eventually return. We have no accurate tests to predict who these patients will be, so our findings are really encouraging. If we can use this tumour DNA test to accurately predict if cancer is going to come back, then it could help doctors decide which patients could benefit from new immunotherapies. These treatments can then reduce the risk of the cancer spreading. The next step is to run a trial where patients have regular blood tests after their initial treatment has finished in order to test this approach.”

Professor Karen Vousden, Cancer Research UK’s chief scientist, said: “Being able to develop an early warning system that will predict if a cancer will return could make a real difference to patients. Research like this shows that for some cancers, there may be ingenious solutions – such as a blood test. If follow up research shows that this test can be used to inform treatment decisions and improve outlook, it could be a game-changer in our ability to deal with advanced skin cancer.”

Notes:
* Lee, R. J., Circulating tumor DNA predicts survival in patients with resected high risk stage II/III melanoma. Annals of Oncology (2017)

** The study also involved researchers based at Warwick University, Oxford University and Cambridge University Hospital.

*** Samples were collected as part of the AVAST-M trial which compared bevacizumab vs. placebo in 1,343 patients with resected high risk stage II/III melanoma.

New research by a team of scientists and archaeologists based at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the University of Copenhagen suggests that the 15,000-year-old ‘Natufian Culture’ could live comfortably in the steppe zone of present-day eastern Jordan – this was previously thought to be either uninhabitable or only sparsely populated.

The hunter-gatherers of the Natufian Culture, which existed in modern-day Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria between c. 14,500 – 11,500 years ago, were some of the first people to build permanent houses and tend to edible plants. These innovations were probably crucial for the subsequent emergence of agriculture during the Neolithic era. Previous research had suggested that the centre of this culture was the Mount Carmel and Galilee region, and that it spread from here to other parts of the region. The new study by the Copenhagen-Weizmann team, published in Scientific Reports, challenges this ‘core region’ theory.

The new paper is based on evidence from a Natufian site located in Jordan, c. 150 km northeast of Amman. The site, called Shubayqa 1, was excavated by a University of Copenhagen team led by Dr. Tobias Richter from 2012-2015.

The excavations uncovered a well-preserved Natufian site, which produced a large assemblage of charred plant remains. These kinds of botanical remains are rare at many other Natufian sites in the region, and enabled the Weizmann-Copenhagen team to obtain the largest number of dates for any Natufian site yet in Israel or Jordan.

“We dated more than twenty samples from different layers of the site, making it one of the best and most accurately dated Natufian sites anywhere. The dates show, among other things, that the site was first settled not long after the earliest dates obtained for northern Israel, ca. 14,600 years ago. This suggests that the Natufian either expanded very rapidly, which we think is unlikely, or that it emerged more or less simultaneously in different parts of the region,” Dr. Richter reports, adding:

“The early date of Shubayqa 1 also shows that Natufian hunter-gatherers were more versatile than previously thought. Past research had linked the emergence of the Natufian to the rich habitat of the Mediterranean woodland zone. But the early dates from Shubayqa show that these late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers were also able to live quite comfortably in more open parkland steppe zones further east. Some of their subsistence appears to have relied heavily on the exploitation of club rush tubers, as well as other wild plants. They also hunted birds, gazelle and other animals,” says Tobias Richter.

Precise dating methodology

The dating was undertaken by Professor Elisabetta Boaretto at the Weizmann Institute of Science using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, or AMS, dating. Boaretto is head of the D-REAMS lab in the Weizmann Institute – one of the few labs in the world that works with the technology and methods to analyze even the smallest organic remains from a site and precisely date them.

Using a specially designed mass spectrometer, Boaretto is able to reveal the amount of carbon-14 in a sample down to the single atom. Based on the half-life of the radioactive carbon-14 atoms, the dating done in her lab is accurate to around 50 years, plus or minus. For the analysis of the specimen from Shubayqa, the team was able to select only short-lived plant species or short-lived plant parts, such as seeds or twigs, to obtain the dates. This ensured the highest possible accuracy for the dates.

Boaretto says that the “core area” theory may have come about, in part, because the Mt. Carmel sites have been the best preserved and studied, until now. In addition to calling into question the idea of the Natufian beginning in one settlement and spreading outwards, the study suggests that the hunter-gatherers who lived 12,000 to 15,000 years ago were ingenious and resourceful. They learned to make use of numerous plants and animals where ever they were, and to tend them in a way that led to early settlement.

The authors say that this supports a view in which there were many pathways to agriculture and “the ‘Neolithic way of life’ was a highly variable and complex process that cannot be explained on the basis of single-cause models.”

When you take on a new management position, there will inevitably be a gap between what you hoped to find and what you actually find. Friction between expectations and reality must be minimized to avoid turbulence in the landing process. But how? What is the best way to move forward?

Professor Guido Stein’s 2017 book, And Now What?, serves as an operating manual for executives taking on new executive roles. Analyzing a number of real cases, Stein describes how to avoid the most typical mistakes, from cultural conflicts to disloyal subordinates.

First Steps

The author begins by examining what an executive must do when taking on and adapting to a new role. To help illustrate, he shares the experiences of four managing directors from different sectors.

A first critical step is to diagram all the people affected by the job change. According to Stein, executives depend as much — or more — on surrounding stakeholders as they do on their own strengths and weaknesses to lead well. Therefore, managing collegial relationships is essential.

Warding off false expectations, new bosses should focus their early communication efforts on obtaining consensus. At the same time, predecessors should not be ignored to help smooth the transition.

The professor stresses that there are basically two types of successful executives: dutiful ones and transformative ones — with the power to transform holding more importance in the upper echelons of management.

In Search of Early Wins

Scoring early successes is essential. Concrete accomplishments will help new managers to communicate their priorities and exert influence. Early wins also help those responsible for the hiring decision (by quieting their detractors). Take on simple, high-visibility problems right away, Stein advises.

When devising an action plan, new managers should:

• Learn all the vital things they don’t yet know, and set aside things they thought they knew but which turn out to be false.
• Determine which issues are truly essential and deal with them decisively.
• Identify the talent they need and the people they can count on. Making poor alliances brings a higher risk of failure — up to 40 percent higher, in fact.
• Stop every now and then to consider whether they’re on the right track and ask others for their opinions.

To perform effectively, the following six action items are key: putting together a mental map to better understand the company and the position; acquiring new knowledge; building working relationships; managing the expectations created; defining one’s leadership style; and having a clear communication plan.

Four common mistakes are: isolating oneself; wanting to have a solution for everything; trying to take on too much; and believing that the same skills that led to successes in the past will be sufficient in the new role.

People Take Center Stage

One of the most pressing actions is to take stock of both the informal and formal company culture. In this sense, Google is a good example of the strength of a people-centered culture.

Culture is the backbone of a company; it can be used to drive organizational improvement and better align employees with the business strategy.

One of the issues new executives must address is the talent they need for the short, medium and long term — and how they might make personnel changes.

• Recruitment and hiring: bosses must identify the knowledge and skills required for each job.
• Development and training: new managers should be aware of the knowledge and skills of existing employees, whose performances should be evaluated throughout the training process.
• Evaluation and promotion: a manager must not lose sight of the culture and values of an organization when considering promotions.
• Compensation: executives must define a career development model before implementing compensation policies, distinguishing between “good professionals” (who perform adequately) and “very good professionals” with rewards.
• Internal communication: a manager must identify channels of corporate communication, knowing that management policies and styles also convey information — and that the rumor mill can and should be managed.

M&A Shakeups

Prof. Stein concludes the first part of his book with the particular characteristics of job changes linked to mergers and acquisitions. While intending to expand or transform a business, these operations often carry hidden costs, including human costs.

It’s important to keep in mind that mergers are often traumatic processes with clear winners and losers. Adding insult to injury, there is often no good communication plan in place to manage employee expectations and discontent in turbulent times.

The company may lose talent, especially on the acquired side, as a result. A newly arrived manager would do well to keep this in mind, as this situation may jeopardize the success of the whole operation.

7 Real Cases

The second part of the book offers instruction via seven real cases — some with fictitious names in order to protect the identities of the protagonists. Here, Stein moves from theory to reality and wraps up.

By Jonathan Cook*

For decades most American Jews have claimed an “Israel exemption”: resolutely progressive on domestic issues, they are hawks on their cherished cause. Racism they would vigorously oppose if applied in the United States is welcomed in Israel.

Reports at the weekend suggested that Donald Trump is about to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, throwing a wrench in any peace plan. If true, the US president will have decisively prioritized support for Israel – and pro-Israel lobbies at home – over justified outrage from Palestinians and the Arab world.

But paradoxically, just as American Jews look close to winning the battle domestically on behalf of Israel, many feel more alienated from a Jewish state than ever before.

There has long been a minority of American Jews whose concerns focused on the occupation. But until now their support for Israel itself has been unwavering, despite its institutionalized racism towards the one in five of the Israeli population who are Palestinian.

A Law of Return denies non-Jews the right to migrate to Israel. Admissions committees bar members of Israel’s Palestinian minority from hundreds of communities. A refusal of family reunification has torn apart Palestinian families in cases where one partner lives in Israel and the other in the occupied territories.

Most Jews have justified to themselves these and many other affronts on the grounds that, after the European holocaust, they deserved a strong state. Palestinians had to pay the price.

Given that half the world’s Jews live outside Israel – the great majority in the US – their support for Israel is critical. They have donated enormous sums, helping to build cities and plant forests. And they have lobbied aggressively at home to ensure diplomatic, financial and military support for their cause. But it is becoming ever harder for them to ignore their hypocrisy.

The rift has grown into a chasm as Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government widens its assault on civil rights. It now targets not just Palestinians but the remnants of liberal Jewish society in Israel – in open contempt for the values of most American Jews.

The peculiar catalyst is a battle over the most significant surviving symbol of Jewishness: the Western Wall, a supporting wall of a long-lost temple in Jerusalem.

Jews in the US mostly subscribe to the progressive tenets of a liberal secularism or Reform Judaism. In Israel, by contrast, the hard-line Orthodox rule supreme on religious matters.

Since the 1967 occupation, Israel’s Orthodox rabbis have controlled prayers at the Western Wall, marginalizing women and other streams of Judaism. That has deeply offended Jewish opinion in the US.

Trapped between American donors and Israel’s powerful rabbis, Netanyahu initially agreed to create a mixed prayer space at the wall for non-Orthodox Jews. But as opposition mounted at home over the summer, he caved in. The shock waves are still reverberating.

Avraham Infeld, a veteran Israeli liaison with the US Jewish community, told the Haaretz newspaper this week that the crisis in relations was “unprecedented”. American Jews have concluded “Israel doesn’t give a damn about them”.

Now a close ally of Netanyahu’s has stoked the fires. In a TV interview last month, Tzipi Hotovely, the deputy foreign minister, all but accused American Jews of being freeloaders. She condemned their failure to fight in the US or Israeli militaries, saying they preferred “convenient lives”.

Her comments caused uproar. They echo those of leading Orthodox rabbis, who argue that Reform Jews are not real Jews – and are possibly even an enemy.

According to a report in the Israeli far-right newspaper Makor Rishon, which is owned by Sheldon Adelson, a US casino billionaire and Netanyahu’s patron, the Israeli prime minister set out his rationale for sacrificing the support of liberal Jews overseas at a recent closed-door meeting with officials.

He reportedly told them that non-Orthodox Jews would disappear in “one or two generations” through low birth rates, intermarriage and more general assimilation. Liberal Jews were a “lost cause” in his view, and wedded to a worldview that was incompatible with Israel’s future.

Both on demographic and ideological grounds, he added, Israel should invest in cultivating stronger ties to Orthodox Jews and Christian evangelicals.

Netanyahu’s demographic predictions may turn out to be faulty, but they are clearly now driving his policy towards liberal Jews at home and abroad.

In fact, as Israel’s attacks on liberals in Israel echo Trump’s rhetoric and policies towards minorities in the US, American Jews are gradually being forced to reassess their longstanding double standard towards Israel.

For some time the Netanyahu government has tarred Israeli anti-occupation organisations like B’Tselem and the soldier whistle-blowing group Breaking the Silence as traitors. Last week it widened the assault.

The education minister, Naftali Bennett, accused the veteran legal group the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) – Israel’s version of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) – of “supporting terrorists”. Forty years of ACRI programs in schools are in jeopardy.

The move follows recent decisions to allow pupils to provide racist answers in civics exams and to expand gender-segregation to universities. Meanwhile, two new bills from Netanyahu’s party would crack down on free speech for Israelis promoting a boycott, even of the settlements. One proposes seven years in jail, the other a fine of $150,000.

New guidelines have empowered the police to bar media access to incident scenes to prevent critical coverage, especially of police violence.

Defence minister Avigdor Lieberman is seeking stronger powers against political activists, Jews and Palestinians alike, including draconian restraining orders and detention without charge or trial.

And for the first time, overseas Jews are being grilled on arrival at Israel’s airport about their political views. Some have signed a “good behavior oath” – a pledge to avoid anti-occupation activities. Already Jewish supporters of boycotts can be denied entry.

The Netanyahu government, it seems, prefers as allies Christian evangelicals and the US alt-right, which loves Israel as much as it appears to despise Jews.

Israel is plotting a future in which American Jews will have to make hard choices. Can they continue to identify with a state that openly turns its back on them?

(A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.)

*Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit his website: www.jonathan-cook.net. 

Transportation and water infrastructure funding and finance in the United States are not nearly as dire as some believe, but a national consensus on infrastructure priorities, accompanied by targeted spending and selected policy changes, is needed, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

While much of the nation’s transportation and water infrastructure is adequately maintained, a 2.5 percent to 3 percent annual spending increase above the total of more than $235 billion now spent annually by local, state, and federal agencies on transportation and water infrastructure largely would eliminate existing maintenance backlogs by 2030, according to researchers.

For more transformational change, a national consensus on capital spending priorities is needed to target regional and national-scale opportunities to meet 21st century needs, while accounting for different priorities across regions and between urban and rural areas, according to the study.

State and local governments already shoulder most of the burden of building and maintaining infrastructure like roads, highways, bridges, water and sewage treatment, storm water systems, airports and ports. The RAND study says such infrastructure projects need federal support through tax advantaged financing, efficiency improvements in regulatory processes, and research and development.

“Spreading federal dollars around to fund short-term, ‘shovel-ready’ projects without a sense of national purpose or priority will not get the nation where it needs to be,” said Debra Knopman, lead author of the report and principal researcher at the RAND, a nonprofit research organization. “The federal government should focus on maintaining and modernizing vital federal infrastructure and on targeting nationally significant projects that are beyond the capacity of individual states and cities.”

Examples include re-engineering connections among regional highway and rail lines, port-rail-highway junctions, airport modernization, major dam repairs, and infrastructure on military installations, in national parks and other publicly managed recreational areas.

Federal assistance can be through direct spending or through the tax code. If it wanted to ensure that state and local governments have reliable and sustained access to capital from a broad class of investors, Congress could preserve the federal tax exemption on interest earned from municipal bonds for at least the next decade, reinstate taxable Build America Bonds, and experiment with other financing alternatives that keep capital flowing to local and state infrastructure investment, including investment through public-private partnerships.

RAND researchers also offer other policy options for Congress that could be used to help the federal government — working with state and local governments and the private sector — to renew and modernize the nation’s infrastructure.

Among these options, RAND researchers list major investments in the renewal of the nation’s most-critical aging and new infrastructure, incorporating advanced technologies to support newer construction methods, more-durable and sustainable materials and sensor technologies that might benefit infrastructure maintenance.

In addition, federal capital funding could include requirements to make projects resilient to natural disasters and climate change in order to reduce future spending on disaster assistance.

By Asanga Abeyagoonasekera*

The circumstances were right in 1933 for James Hilton to craft the image of Shangri-La in his novel Lost Horizon. It appeared as food for thought to many thinkers in the west who were disillusioned with the direction of world events and keen to entertain notions of a fantastical Oriental utopia. The effects of the First World War prevailed at the time, and against the backdrop of economic insecurity, many sought a Shangri-La such as that in the picture painted by Hilton.

With China at its helm, the rise of the east – once better known as the Orient – is clear. According to the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) 2030 report, the largest economies in terms of global GDP in 2030 will be China (23.8 per cent), the US (17.3 per cent), and the EU (14.3 per cent), followed by India.

The Indian Ocean port city of Colombo is among the most recent to welcome the luxury hotel chain, Shangri-La. The palatial space at the very heart of the city was declared open by President Sirisena weeks ago. His predecessor, President Rajapaksa, initiated the development and provided 10 acres of prime land previously occupied by the Ministry of Defence. This new landmark will add value to the tourism industry of the island. But in an unfavourable economic environment with high debts of approximately US$ 64 billion, and 95 per cent of government revenue going towards debt repayment, the Sri Lankan economy has become weaker due to low revenue generation. Sri Lanka dropped 14 places in the 2017 World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) Report. In a few months, another vision of utopia will be contrived in the next election campaign for public consumption.

Polarising events challenge world leaders daily to find solutions to complex problems. The capacity, capability, and courage to find solutions is best demonstrated after assuming power, if the aim is achievable. In Sri Lanka, several leaders who have had the vision to work toward a prosperous nation were cut off by prevailing circumstances. Globally esteemed statesmen from Sri Lanka include the late Lalith Athulathmudali, SWRD Bandaranayake, and Lakshman Kadirgamar. This fact is no more apparent than in the Oxford Union, where portraits of three visionary Sri Lakan statesmen – the late Lalith Athulathmudali, SWRD Bandaranayake, and Lakshman Kadirgamar – are a reminder of their prolific work cut short by their untimely demise. All three were transformational leaders who played a significant role in Sri Lankan society and the nation’s political life. Yet, common to the three leaders was also their untimely end due to political assassination. The trifecta of tragedy is but another of many reflections of Sri Lanka’s brutal political culture.

Lalith Athulathmudali was even offered a high-level position by Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, which he declined. Sri Lanka, however, failed to reap the benefits of this visionary leader. Today the question stands whether new leaders will emerge and transform Sri Lankan society for the better; whether politicians and practitioners have the capacity and aptitude to deliver. One could point to challenges presented by the constitution or from elsewhere, but even if the constitution is redrafted, the right personnel must be in place to turn legislation into policy.

Venerable Sobitha Thero, the influential Buddhist monk who pursued a non-violent path towards a ‘silent revolution’ in the hope of creating a better political culture, was commemorated a few weeks ago on the anniversary of his death. The political elite – the executioners of the promises and pledges to the Sri Lankan people – should reflect on the great prelate’s words and ask themselves if the silent revolution has delivered during the past three years.

President Sirisena has provided an answer and at the same time justified his government’s attempts to investigate a bond scam at the Central Bank: “If Venerable Sobitha Thero was alive he would have approved of what I did. Why did we come here? Why did we change the previous government? What is our objective? Did we come here to fill our pockets? Did we come to rob? I did not appoint [the Commission on Central Bank Bond investigation] targeting anyone.” Yet those appointed to stamp out corruption have become embroiled in controversy due to revelations linked to this investigation, which has led to the prime minister providing testimony. A daily newspaper revealed that the leading suspect in the corruption probe made many phone calls to high-level investigating officers. Upon further inquiry it was revealed that the communications concerned plans to publish a book about the infamous bond fiasco. Whatever the content, it is certain to be a bestseller in the run-up to local elections.

This scenario recalls a parable in Orwell’s Animal Farm that was also relevant prior to Sirisena’s electoral victory in January 2015: replacement of the farm owner and a name change from Manor Farm to Animal Farm was futile; the expected political transformation did not materialise since the animals soon behaved the same as, and transformed into, the human lot from the past.

The nation will be in election mode in a few months. Leaders will emerge from the provincial and local levels to fulfill election targets and promises of prosperity. Whatever the result, there is indeed one essence distilled from the ages and preserved against time, which is none other than democracy.

Views expressed are the author’s own.

* Asanga Abeyagoonasekera
Director General, Institute of National Security Studies (INSS), Sri Lanka

The Bhopal gas tragedy In India took place on December 3, 1984, which was around 33 years back and now stands as monument for the inhuman approach of a multinational company towards the poor and innocent Indian victims. Around 42 tonne of methyl isocyanate gas leaked out from the plant that killed around 20,000 people and severely affected around 0.5 million people who lived near the plant site.

Poor maintenance of the hazardous plant

The author of this article had the opportunity to visit the plant site of Union Carbide at Bhopal a few weeks after the accident and saw the facility including the equipment from where the gas leaked. It was obvious that the gas leak occurred due to poor shop floor practices and inadequate maintenance of the equipment.

It was an accident that could have been prevented, if the maintenance activity of the plant had been conducted with care and with appropriate management practices. Obviously, this was not done.

Owners and managers ran away

The then Union Carbide management was entirely responsible for this accident and this is an indisputable fact.

Around 0.5 million people were allowed to live near the plant site and they were all poor people living in small hut like dwellings. They have not been cautioned about the hazardous nature of the operations of the pesticide plant . Knowing that highly toxic chemicals were used in the process plant, no steps were taken by the government to shift the residents away by providing them alternate accommodation.

In all probability, the management of the Union Carbide also did not take any steps to request the government to shift the people living around the facility. If Union Carbide had found that the people living around could not be shifted away, it could have taken steps earlier to shift the plant facility to some other area away from densely populated zone.

Obviously, Union Carbide thought that such a grave accident would never happen and it had big confidence about it’s capability to maintain this plant at safe level , which was proved to be false.

Union Carbide is guilty of maintaining the plant facilities in a careless way, particularly considering the fact that toxic gases were being used in the plant.

When the accident happened, the management of the Union Carbide simply ran away from the scene with least care for the plight of the victims.

Dow Chemicals no better

When Dow Chemicals took over Union Carbide, it knew about the suffering of the people due to the accident and it took over the exposure liabilities.

The subsequent attitude of the Dow Chemicals in dealing with the Bhopal gas tragedy was shocking.

Against the original damage claim of 3.3 billion USD, Dow Chemicals ultimately paid only 470 million USD. And Dow Chemicals gave an impression that it thought that it’s responsibility was over with the payment of this money, which only revealed it’s insensitivity towards human suffering, which was caused by the inefficiency of Union Carbide, that was taken over by Dow Chemicals later on.

One cannot but think that there is pettiness on the part of the multinational outfit which has failed in taking adequate measures to rehabilitate the victims of the gas leak.

The multinational company may have won the court case but remains as a guilty outfit in the eyes of the discerning people.

Except giving some money as compensation which is much less than what the poor victims deserve, the company has virtually run away from the scene and now has a permanent scar on it’s face.

Is DowDuPont any better?

Now, Dow chemical and DuPont, the two multinational companies have merged to form a new company known as DowDuPont. Obviously, in the merger decision of the two companies, there was no consideration about the responsibility of Union Carbide/ Dow Chemicals towards Bhopal gas victims.

DowDuPont is the new entity that now has to bear the cross for Union Carbide / Dow Chemicals causing so much of sufferings and then remaining unmindful of their plight and simply satisfying itself by paying a small compensation amount unequal to the level of tragedy.

The fact that during the merger of Dow Chemicals and DuPont to form a new entity DowDuPont , the plight of Bhopal victims was not even mentioned, expose it as an organization with guilt.

While this multinational company DowDuPont is rolling in wealth and with enormous money and muscle power, it stands condemned for ignoring the plight of Bhopal gas victims when Dow chemicals and DuPont merged.

Every employee of Dow DuPont should hang his/her head in shame at the type of attitude displayed by the company, which amounts to inhuman attitude.

Directors of DowDuPont have now shown themselves to be those, who practice business management without ethics and humaneness. The curse of the poor victims ,dead and alive ,are there for all to see.

Cleverly tucked away in almost each and every “contract” struck by and between the American People and the corporate/banking behemoths dotting the American landscape, is a little-known (or understood) paragraph (or series of paragraphs) entitled “Mandatory Arbitration Clause.”

Normally, 90% of people that enter into an online or corporate contract for services never really read in-depth these boring, verbose, horrifically complex little “legalese” arbitration clauses containing run-on sentences, dry grammar, and silly pronouns, which essentially sign away on these people’s entire livelihoods, bank accounts, real property, money, human rights, civil liberties, constitutional guarantees, or even personal dignity.

And the worst part of all of this is that the only ones who benefit from these “Arbitration Clauses” are the Deep State Oligarchs who literally control, and are in the process of controlling even more, of the entire economic, technological, and financial marketplace, of virtually everything.

While more and more corporate/banking/technological behemoths are steadily moving towards more and more mergers and acquisitions, aided and abetted by an equally corrupt and cronied Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) run by the same Deep State ingrates for the last 30 years, buying one another out, and further consolidating their own money and power at the expense of the American people, they are also increasingly and uniformly inserting a de rigeur arbitration clause demanding that the American masses and consumers that they do business with, forever and absolutely relinquish and give up their right to sue, or seek judicial or court redress for acts that federal case law has now clearly stated includes outright theft, deceit, racial or sexual or religious discrimination, verbal or physical abuse, dishonesty, unfairly targeting anyone based on anything that the corporate/banking CEO hates, and other outrageous and inhumane reasons that the Founding Fathers frankly fought a war with England to get away from.

The slow motion re-capturing of the American people and their property by the global oligarch banks and corporations is occurring right before the eyes of American patriots every single day – without the firing of a single shot.

The slow, painful, clandestine, and surreptitious subversion of the basic human rights, civil liberties, and constitutional protections which used to make the United States of America special, are now rapidly going the way of the extinct “Dodo Bird,” and are now becoming mere quaint and fond memories of an older generation of Americans, who can still remember that they could always sue whenever they were royally screwed over by a corporate/banking entity, in any capacity.

Now, both state and federal judges, upon seeing a “Motion to Compel Arbitration” submitted by a well-heeled, smug Big Law Corporate Attorney with really nice shoes and a $5000 suit, will noticeably shift uncomfortably in his seat (if he is honest) even when he is confronted with a Complaint from a litigant which contains the most awful, mind-shattering, specific, backed by evidence, horrific, unethical, illegal, and human rights violating acts by that corporate/banking entity or its employees, because that judge knows fully well, that there is absolutey no escape from that arbitration clause, and he must dismiss that case without bringing those perpetrators to justice, or letting a hearing continue, or even bringing them and their acts to light with Discovery, because he could literally lose his job as a judge, or be sanctioned/ disciplined if he doesn’t.

The Arbitration Tribunal where the injured complainant is inevitably shunted into, like a horse waiting to be shot, is invariably staffed by corporate/banking cronies of those criminal oligarchs who run those offending companies, and they all play golf or drink at the same country clubs together, and are more “in bed” with one another, than anyone truly realizes.

To add insult to injury, the aggrieved litigant must literally pay through the nose to take part in said “arbitration,” often going bankrupt in the process, only to literally get reamed out even further by that offending company’s buddies on the arbitration panel.

This is truly the most sickening part of all of this, and desperately needs attention by the United States Congress and Senate to change/amend the laws governing Mandatory Arbitration Clauses, but judging by the recent Republican gutting of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) recently a few weeks ago, and the oligarch/plutocrat stranglehold on the banking/corporate entities in America (and the globe), this legislative investigation, review, amendment, and desperately needed change is not likely to happen, anytime soon.

In fact, it is more likely to get worse, until the American People are all truly back as Colonial subjects of England, where “peasants” were thrown into the “stocks” if they so much as “offended” the Queen, or her noblemen and favored “subjects.”

The situation in the judiciary with these Mandatory Arbitration Clauses is truly dire, and cries out for intervention, urgently, and immediately, by the United States Congress and Senate.

By Sandip Kumar Mishra*

North Korea’s Hwasong-15 missile test on 29 November 2017 reached an altitude of 4,500 km and flew around 960 km. According to estimates, the missile would have flown around 13,000 km had it been fired in the right trajectory. If true, this means that North Korean missile capability is now within striking distance of Washington, DC. The test took place after a lull of almost two and half months, a period that included US President Donald Trump’s 12-day visit to East Asia.

North Korea watchers have been keen to figure out Kim Jong-un’s reaction to Trump’s visit. Although North Korea remained restrained during the visit itself, the recent missile test has proved that Pyongyang is adamant on its course and that US’ policy has failed to achieve its objective. Through contradictory announcement and statements on the issue from Trump and his administration, the US has attempted a ‘game of madmen’ with Kim.

After the test, North Korea announced the successful completion of its nuclear and delivery programme-related targets. Rodong Shinmun, the official North Korean newspaper, noted that North Korea had “finally realised the great historic cause of completing the state nuclear force.” This is an alarming state of affairs, and all options to deal with North Korea’s nuclear progress must be considered. It is also important to analyse whether the North Korean announcement could be taken as its intent not to test any further. If North Korea has indeed achieved its targets, it may be ready to come to the negotiation table. This in fact could be an opportunity to talk to North Korea, though it cannot be guaranteed that such negotiations would necessarily lead to North Korea’s de-nuclearisation.

However, it seems that the US is going continue its policy of denial vis-à-vis North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes. A US official told a CNN correspondent that the “North Korean missile broke up upon re-entry.” This seems to be a continuation of a past tactic, which is to doubt North Korea’s nuclear and missile advancements. Earlier, too, the US administration maintained that North Korea could not have sophisticated and miniaturised warheads, and that its missiles were not precise and reliable enough to travel beyond East Asia. Gradually, many of these claims have been proven wrong. However, the US administration has deliberately been moving the goal post or ‘redlines’ regarding North Korea.

Another standard response came from the US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley. She said that if war comes, “the North Korean regime will be utterly destroyed.” She further threatened that in case China did not restrict its oil supply to North Korea, the US would “take the oil situation into its own hands.” This is part of the larger pattern of threatening statements from the US administration in response to North Korean developments.

Within a week of the test, the US has begun its largest ever joint air exercise with South Korea, called ‘Vigilant Ace’. The exercise will last five days, with the participation of 230 aircraft, including 24 stealth fighter jets (six F-22s and 18 F-35s). Although the US held a similar exercise in 2016, its timing and more significantly, the scale, are unusual enough for North Korea to characterise it as a grave provocation.”

The US policy towards North Korea seems to be based on denying Pyongyang’s capability and provoking it further until Jong-un makes a mistake. The idea is that if North Korea crosses the ‘redline’ by attacking South Korea, Japan or US territory, the Trump administration would be justified in undertaking military action to eliminate the Jong-un regime. If North Korea makes the first move, it will not be easy for China to come to the rescue. In fact, this policy will cost enormous human and material damage to South Korea as well as Japan, and is not a wise course of action.

However, this adventurist US policy of seems to have been well deciphered by North Korea. The regime has been careful not to cross the ‘redline’ and is working within its limits. It has been able to concentrate on developing its nuclear and missile programmes without crossing the ‘redline’. It could be said that because of the US policy, North Korea has been able to make huge strides in a very short span of time, which would otherwise have taken decades. It is high time to accept that not only is the US policy dangerous, it has been successfully used by North Korea to augment its nuclear and missile development goals. Only after this acknowledgement can a better policy option be considered.

* Sandip Kumar Mishra
Associate Professor, Centre for East Asian Studies, SIS, JNU, & Visiting Fellow, IPCS

The solipsistic Trump “revolution” is unfolding on fantasies about economic growth.

By Manoj Joshi

On Saturday, the Republican Party passed a tax bill which critics say will make the rich richer and the poor poorer. The Borowitz Report, a satirical column in The New Yorker, said Kim Jong-un was concerned that his plan for destroying the US had been “made totally irrelevant by the Republican tax bill moving through the Senate.”

The Republicans, he believed, would upstage his plan to destroy America.

Debt plunge

The plan would add $1.4 trillion (₹90 lakh crore) to the federal deficit over the next decade, a debt that could lead to future cuts in medical and social security programmes. The display on the National Debt Clock mounted on Times Square in New York is around $20.5 trillion (₹1,320 lakh crore) and rising. It is the highest as a proportion of the economy since 1950.

The solipsistic Trump “revolution” is unfolding on fantasies about economic growth. Just how the President expects to embark on his proposed $1 trillion (₹65 lakh crore) plan of revitalising the crumbling infrastructure of his nation is difficult to fathom. The tax cuts will, if anything, reduce the capacity of the state and local governments to fund new projects and maintain older ones.

Earlier this year, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave a failing grade to American infrastructure, saying that even to reach passing grade, the country would have to spend $4.59 trillion (₹300 lakh crore). Infrastructure investment was a major theme of the Trump campaign, but as of now the only thing that is being built is the Great Wall to keep out Mexican migrants.

But despite his boorish behaviour, Trump is very much in command. Just who was responsible for the identical items carried in the Washington Post and New York Times last week that he was about to replace secretary of state Rex Tillerson is not clear. But Trump took the opportunity to not only deny the story, but to emphasise that even though the two of them have differences, “I call the final shots.”

The US remains the most important economic and military power in the world. The Narendra Modi government has put all its foreign policy eggs in the American basket. If the US is determined to commit harakiri, it has implications for India, if not the world.

China Factor

New Delhi has been moving rapidly to embrace the Trump administration’s new Indo-Pacific policy articulated by Trump and Tillerson. In essence, it seeks to bring India into the American military calculations in the power balance against China.

New Delhi, too, needs the US because the state of its own economy and military reveal an increasing gap in the relative power between India and China. India has quickly embraced the Quadrilateral idea has played an active role in the meetings at the ministerial and official levels in 2017.

Last week, it  was announced that Indian Navy ships would be able to refuel and restock in Singapore’s Changi Naval base. Significantly, in mid 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to be the star guest at the Shangrila Dialogue, organised by the IISS, London and blessed by the government of Singapore.

As of now, the Trump vision for the Indo-Pacific has been articulated through speeches. But it is waiting to be fleshed out to offer a credible and sustainable response to the rise of China.

India’s presence at this Track 1 security summit has so far been fitful. Modi is likely to use the occasion to further cement India’s commitment to Trump’s Indo-Pacific vision. How does all this connect up with the state of the US? The credibility of any leader or nation is based on its domestic and international profile.

Alternative

The combined military might of the US, Japan, India and Australia is much greater than that of China, but smaller Asia Pacific states are awaiting an economic and investment policy that will offset the gravitational pull of Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative.

In his speech at the CSIS earlier this year, Tillerson had said that a “quiet conversation” had begun between various countries to come up with alternative financing institutions, while warning that it would not be easy to compete with Chinese conditions anyway.

For his part, Trump did not even bother to speak of this issue in his Asian tour, having gutted the TPP, all he had on offer were bilateral trade deals for which there have been no takers. India needs all the money it has to build its own infrastructure. Japan by itself cannot be the sole provider of foreign assistance. But with the American elite focused on itself, there is little chance that it will cough up resources to power the Indo-Pacific alternative Tillerson has spoken off. This is what America First looks like, anyway.

This article originally appeared in Mail Today.

By Michael Hart

More than eight years after government forces crushed the northern Tamil Tiger separatists in the bloody final battle of Sri Lanka’s 25-year civil war, victims of alleged human rights abuses committed by both sides still await a semblance of justice. On a visit to the island nation last month, the UN’s special rapporteur for transitional justice, Pablo De Greiff, lamented the government’s failure to establish a hybrid court to try those accused of committing war crimes. De Greiff warned Sri Lanka over its slow progress, stating the delay in investigating alleged abuses “raises many questions about the determination of the government to undertake a comprehensive transitional justice program.”

The worst of the alleged abuses took place during the last few weeks of the conflict in May 2009, when government troops cornered the remaining rebels in a thin slice of territory along Sri Lanka’s northeast coastline. The UN and human rights groups have accused the government of extra-judicial killings, forced disappearances, and indiscriminately shelling in civilian ‘no-fire zones.’ Meanwhile, the Tamil Tigers have been accused of launching suicide bombings, recruiting child soldiers, and using civilians as human shields during the final battle.

It is estimated that in the dying months of the conflict, anywhere between 7,000 and 40,000 civilians were killed. In addition, tens of thousands of Sri Lankans – mostly from the Tamil ethnic minority – have disappeared without trace. With progress toward establishing a war crimes tribunal stalled almost a decade after the bloodshed ended, this article reflects on Sri Lanka’s post-war politics and looks at the political controversy surrounding efforts to put war criminals on trial.

The conflict between the government and the Tamil Tigers – formally known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – began in 1983, after rebels fighting for an independent Tamil homeland in the northeast killed 13 soldiers in an ambush. Ethnic tensions had long been simmering between the Hindu Tamil minority and the Buddhist Sinhalese majority since Sri Lanka’s independence in 1948. The LTTE initially carried out a guerrilla campaign consisting of suicide bomb attacks and ambushes targeting security personnel, before a full-scale civil war erupted in the mid-1990s. The two sides eventually signed a ceasefire mediated by Norway in 2002, before violence once again flared in the mid-2000s as the LTTE regained swathes of territory in its strongholds.

After the election of authoritarian president Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2005, the military took the fight to the rebels with renewed vigor. In January 2008, the government formally withdrew from the ceasefire and launched an all-out offensive designed to bring an end to the conflict. Over the next eighteen months, government forces re-took most rebel-held territory in the northeast, including the strategically-important town of Kilinochchi, which had served as the LTTE’s headquarters for more than a decade. On 19 May 2009, President Rajapaksa declared the country ‘‘liberated’’ from terrorism, as the remnants of the LTTE laid down their arms after their long-time leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was killed in a shoot-out with government troops.

The final weeks of the conflict were among its most bloody. More than 80,000 fleeing civilians became trapped in a small pocket of territory between rapidly advancing soldiers and retreating LTTE rebels. War crimes were allegedly committed by both sides. International human rights groups accused government forces of shelling civilians in areas which had been demarcated as ‘safe zones,’ as well as carrying-out extra-judicial killings of captured Tamil fighters. The LTTE were accused of forcibly recruiting children in an attempt to bolster its rapidly-dwindling ranks, as well as launching suicide attacks in civilian areas and using fleeing civilians as human shields, even reportedly firing in front of crowds to prevent trapped people from leaving the combat zone. Media outlets – notably Channel 4 in the UK – obtained video footage purporting to show the aftermath of hospitals being shelled, as well as unarmed Tamil fighters being blindfolded and executed by government troops at point-blank range. The footage prompted international outcry and condemnation.

The Sri Lankan government at the time – led by former president Mahinda Rajapaksa – denied all allegations of abuse, labelling the unverified video footage as ‘‘fabricated’’ and an outside attempt to destabilize the country. Rajapaksa’s administration rejected all calls for an international inquiry, despite calls by the UN for Sri Lanka to set-up a hybrid court with the involvement of foreign judges.

Hopes for a formal investigation into war crimes were raised in January 2015 following the surprise election victory of Maithripala Sirisena. President Sirisena was elected on a reform ticket pledging to curb the powers of the presidency, fight corruption and protect freedom of speech, marking a clear break from the increasingly-authoritarian strongman-type regime led by Rajapaksa.

Under Sirisena, a degree of progress has indeed been made. The government has initiated public consultations on issues related to the conflict, and last year set up an ‘Office for Missing Persons’ to trace more than 20,000 people who disappeared during the conflict and its aftermath. Among the missing are activists, journalists, and critics of the government along with thousands of former LTTE rebels, family members, and Tamil rights campaigners. The government has now acknowledged the problem and announced that family members of missing persons will be issued with certificates, but as yet little progress has been made in finding out the truth of what happened to the disappeared.

Some observers contend that many of the missing Tamils have been abducted by military and intelligence officers, and have either been killed or may still be being held in state-run detention centers. Some evidence has emerged to support this theory, with campaign groups such as Freedom from Torture and the International Truth and Justice Project presenting harrowing witness accounts and first-hand testimonies detailing detention and torture in military camps. Whilst these accounts are unverified, they have been supported by a number of legal and medical experts.

In the year after his election victory, President Sirisena spoke at the UN General Assembly of the importance of confronting his country’s past, pledging to “follow a process of truth-seeking, justice, reparation, and non-recurrence.” He appeared to back up these words in September 2015 by tentatively agreeing to the terms of a UN Security Council resolution to establish a hybrid court – made up of both Sri Lankan and international judges – which would put on trial those suspected of committing war crimes during the Tamil conflict. The move was praised by most member states.

Yet progress in establishing the tribunal has been slow, and Sirisena appears to have backtracked on some of his early promises. A reconciliation consultation committee appointed by Sri Lanka’s government recommended earlier this year that “international participation in the court be phased-out” once the “required expertise and capacity has been built-up” among locally-appointed judges. The tribunal has still not come to fruition, and Sri Lanka received a two-year extension in March this year to fulfill its commitment to the UN resolution, further delaying the process.

Last month, the UN’s special rapporteur for transitional justice, Pablo De Greiff, warned the government in Colombo that further delays in making good on the promise to establish a war crimes tribunal involve significant risks. After a two-week visit to Sri Lanka, he said “no-one should be under the impression that waiting is a costless alternative,” adding that “failure to achieve progress in fully addressing issues [related to the civil war] constitutes a denial of justice.”

The longer it takes to establish the truth and secure justice for what happened in the final weeks of the conflict back in May 2009, the more likely it is that the frustration of victims and tensions between Sri Lanka’s Tamil and Sinhalese communities will rise. Many Tamils still hold grievances and resent their perceived repression at the hands of the state – particularly at the hands of the military – who retain a dominant presence in the northeast of the country. These suspicions will surely continue to fester for as long as relatives of the deceased and the disappeared sense a continued lack of accountability for abuses committed by state actors during the war, and an absence of justice for its thousands of civilian victims.

President Sirisena’s government has undoubtedly made progress through the introduction of limited reforms, yet accusations of human rights abuses and impunity for state actors continue to be made. It is time for the tougher and more controversial issues related to the final stages of conflict to be tackled – including confronting allegations of human rights abuses and war crimes on both sides – if reconciliation is to be achieved and Sri Lanka is to finally move on from a dark chapter in its history.

The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the authors are theirs alone and don’t reflect any official position of Geopoliticalmonitor.com.

The Moscow stock exchange will soon issue nearly $1 billion-worth of yuan-denominated bonds. It will become the start of a new financial system not based on the US dollar, analysts say.

Russia will issue the 6 billion yuan (about $900 million) bonds with a five-year maturity in December or January. The Central Bank says it is testing the water for future investments.

“Such steps will make it possible to remove the dollar from mutual settlements and use only yuan and rubles (mostly yuan for the moment) in the mid-term, if more specialists from the Russian financial sector work in this direction,” Gleb Zadoya, Head of Analytics at Analitika Online told RT.

Russian bonds in yuan could be interesting for the Chinese, as China has trillions of dollars of excessive liquidity, as well as hundreds of thousands of new investors who are interested in trying new markets, the analyst said.

For Russia, facing a new round of US sanctions aimed at its bond market, it is a great opportunity to get closer to China, according to Zadoya.

Petr Pushkarev, Chief Analyst at TeleTrade, says investing in Russian yuan bonds is a great opportunity for Chinese investors to diversify their dollar-dominated portfolios.

“The step itself is more symbolic for now, because $1 billion is too little given the relations between Russia and China. Yet this is the beginning of a long journey, and this is a landmark move that shows the international monetary system is moving towards multipolarity, and that Russia is ready to take active steps in this direction with a certain development of events,” he told RT.

According to Pushkarev, It is very natural for China, Russia and other countries to want to create a dollarless system.

“By doing so, they can gradually abandon the obsolete system of dollar settlements, where the US dominates and doesn’t fully accept Russia or other countries as equal and respected partners,” said Pushkarev.

The Russian bonds boast high yields, and even western investors are likely to find ways to bypass any possible American sanctions, says Ivan Kapustiansky, Forex Optimum analyst.

“The five-year Russian euro bonds are trading at 3.2 percent per annum, and the Chinese government securities boast a 3.6-3.9 percent yield. However, Russian bonds in yuan are likely to offer a better yield than the Chinese national debt,” he told RT.

By Igor Spaic

Bosnian journalists and international organisations urged the authorities to address death threats sent to reporters who covered last week’s Hague Tribunal conviction of six Bosnian Croats and Slobodan Praljak’s suicide.

Bosnian news associations and international organisations have strongly condemned a series of death threats issued to journalists who reported on the verdict convicting six Bosnian Croats of war crimes and the suicide of one of them, Slobodan Praljak.

Since the moment Praljak drank poison in the courtroom at the Hague Tribunal after his conviction for crimes against humanity was upheld, some journalists who covered it and described Praljak as a war criminal have been targeted by nationalists in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia.

According to the Association of BH Journalists, numerous journalists have been threatened with death or rape via social media or email.

Among them are Sanel Kajan of Al Jazeera Balkans, Stefica Galic, the editor of the Tacno.net news site, Arijana Saracevic Helac, an editor at Bosnia’s Federation entity broadcaster, and Lejla Turcilo, a professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Sarajevo.

“You will not live long. I promise,” said one threat to Sanel Kajan on Facebook.

“Every threat, especially heavy categories in which one is threatened with violence and murder, is strongly punished in every developed country in Europe and in the world,” Kajan told BIRN.

“It is time to start punishing this type of violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina too, as well as in the countries of the region,” he said.

Kajan said that he received numerous threatening messages, which at first he ignored and blocked.

“Until I realised the seriousness of those threats. Minute by minute, the number of threats was rising,” he said.

He said those who sent the threats were also provoked by nationalist journalists who branded him a ‘Croat hater’ because he called the convicts war criminals.

“To call a convicted war criminal what he is – a convicted war criminal – is telling the truth,” Kajan pointed out, and added: “Those who don’t like it should not hold us responsible.”

Kajan lives in Mostar, the stronghold of Bosnian Croat nationalism in the country – which was the ‘capital’ of the wartime unrecognised Croat-led Herzeg-Bosnia statelet, of which the six convicted men were officials – and the threats mostly focused on his hometown.

“Just keep sharing those Al Jazeera stories. You will have to walk around Mostar,” stated one of them.

He was also called an “unchristened Satan”, told to move away because Mostar is a “Croat city”, and insulted for reporting negatively about the “hero” Praljak.

Kajan reported the threats to police and Ljudevit Maric, a spokesperson for the Herzegovina Neretva canton’s Interior Ministry, told N1 TV news on Monday that the authorities are working on identifying those who sent them.

The OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Harlem Desir, also called on the authorities in Bosnia and Croatia on Tuesday to investigate the threats.

“Authorities have an obligation to ensure that journalists have safe working conditions, and that persons threatening them are prosecuted,” Desir said.

The managing board of the Association of BH Journalists condemned the “hysteria and the spreading of an atmosphere of fear through media and social media, as well as the almost organised outbursts of hate and brutal insults aimed at all those who raised their voice against embracing the crimes and the convicted Bosnian Croats”.

Kajan said that unless the authorities take action, “the message to professional journalists and those who threaten them is clear. To those who threaten: keep on threatening! To the journalists: shut up!”

Saudi Arabia on Thursday expressed “great disappointment” over US President Donald Trump’s announcement recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and relocating the US embassy to Jerusalem.

In a statement carried by the Saudi Press Agency (SPA), the royal court said the Kingdom had previously warned of the serious consequences of such an “irresponsible and unwarranted step.”

On Tuesday, Saudi King Salman warned Trump that moving the US embassy for Israel to Jerusalem was a “dangerous step” that could rile Muslims worldwide.

“The Kingdom expresses its denunciation and deep regret that the (Trump) administration has taken this step, as it represents a great bias against the historic and permanent rights of the Palestinian people in Jerusalem, which have been affirmed by the relevant international resolutions and have been recognized and supported by the international community,” the statement said.

It said that although Trump’s move does not diminish the “inalienable and preserved rights of the Palestinian people in Jerusalem and other occupied territories,” it does “exemplify a drastic regression in the efforts to move the peace process forward.”

“(It) is a shift away from the United States‘ historically impartial position with regard to the issue of Jerusalem, which will further complicate the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” the royal court said.

It said Saudi Arabia is calling on the US administration to reverse its action and support the international will to enable the Palestinian people to regain their legitimate rights.

“The Kingdom reaffirms the importance of finding a just and lasting solution to the Palestinian cause in accordance with the relevant international resolutions, and the Arab Peace Initiative, so that the Palestinian people can regain their legitimate rights, which will strengthen security and stability in the region,” the statement said.”

Trump’s action was widely denounced, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan saying it was not only “irresponsible and illegal” also plays into the hands of terrorists.

Jordan decried the announcement as a violation of international law and the UN charter.

So many people in the Middle East viewed the potential role Donald Trump would play as president would be to bring change to the region. They bought into the biased coverage of the liberal mainstream American news media, which focused on his ability to sow seeds of anger and even hatred.

What the media was protecting was a system in which mealy-mouthed politicians have managed to sustain a status quo that sees Israel and the Palestinians at loggerheads, without any hope for peace. Yet Israel’s government has cleverly and masterfully used that impasse to build alliances with many Arab countries without consequences or accountability.

Israel has been able to use the failure of the peace process as a cover to continue its extremist agenda of expanding illegal settlements and oppressing non-Jews both inside Israel and in the Occupied Territories. The Arabs have never recognized this strategy; that the absence of peace has been beneficial to Israel, and that many American politicians in the Democratic Party have helped sustain this status quo to Israel’s benefit.

Every American politician who has called for peace has done so with a lack of sincerity. By urging peace without substance or concrete steps forward, they have reinforced Israel’s ability to do whatever it wants in Palestine. And Israel has done whatever it wants. It has dramatically increased settlements without any major consequence; it has continued official government policy of confiscating more and more Palestinian lands in the West Bank; and it has continued to oppress Palestinians, tightening its headlock hold on the civilians living in the open air “hell” called the Gaza Strip, while slowly chipping away at Palestinian resistance in the West Bank.

Without the chance of achieving peace, Israel has been able to achieve all of its goals and more, expanding Israel without consequence. But Trump is changing that. Instead of pandering to Israel with fake words of praise for peace, Trump is creating a unique and new environment that will inevitably force change on the region.

Trump was never going to achieve peace through happiness — he was going to do it by throwing up the Middle East “game board” and disrupting a status quo that has been a disadvantage to the Palestinian people.

Trump has promised to push for peace, but he has steadily taken American foreign policy from a position of supporting Israel to a new advanced position of advocating for Israel’s agenda. The fuse that Trump will light that will change the region is his decision to move the US Embassy to the sacred city of Jerusalem, which has been under occupation in part since 1948 and fully occupied since 1967. Israel expelled the Palestinians presence from West Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967, and has been doing the same in East Jerusalem since 1967.

Trump will do what even the most wildly supportive advocates of Israeli colonialism have stopped short of doing. Trump will push the region into a new environment that will change the current status quo in a way Palestinians need most. Palestinians have been lulled into believing that prior American administrations were determined to fight for the two-state solution, but that option was killed by Israel’s right-wing governments immediately after its architect, Yitzhak Rabin, was murdered in 1995.

Despite the failure to agree a peace deal, Palestinians have continued to cling to hope because they are the victims of oppression. They have been pushed into a corner where their only hope was to hope for peace, with small bursts of resistance and violence.

Trump will change that. He is taking the old game board of phony Middle East peace and throwing it into the air. Moving the embassy will trigger a region-wide enmity and acrimony that will become the basis for Israel’s worst nightmare. Moving the US embassy and recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel will create an explosion that America and Israel have worked hard to avoid. It is an act that will bring devastating change. The desire to fight for justice has been smothered by false promises of peace.

Yasser Arafat was betrayed after Rabin was murdered — had Rabin lived, we might have had peace today, but the Israeli right made sure that would never happen by assassinating him. It pushed Arafat into a corner, where he withered, powerlessly, and vanished. And with him vanished the Palestinian revolution. No one in the Palestinian or Arab world has managed to recreate the impassioned revolution to force change and seek justice that Arafat masterfully built.

Trump is the new Rabin, but a different kind of Rabin, who will open the door to change. And that change will not be in Israel’s interests, even though they will finally cross the demarcation line of sensibility and push the region into a new turmoil. Instead of opposing Trump’s actions, maybe we should encourage him to do what others have deemed “dangerous steps.”

Move the embassy. Recognize Jerusalem. And then sit back and watch the region explode in anger, protest and a rejection of the state of coma that the fake promise of peace has put on the entire region.
Get ready everyone. The region is about the change.

By Catherine Stupp

(EurActiv) — A major technology industry association has lashed out at national data protection regulators for a critical report on the EU’s privacy shield data agreement with the United States.

DigitalEurope, a lobby group that represents tech firms including Google, Amazon and Microsoft, sharply criticised a group of national privacy authorities from EU countries, who threatened to file lawsuits that could topple the deal.

The regulators warned that they may take legal action if the US government does not add tighter data protection safeguards to the agreement by May 2018.

Cecilia Bonefeld-Dahl, the director of DigitalEurope, said on Wednesday (6 December) that if the watchdogs “believe the Commission is mistaken in its assessment” from September to continue the privacy shield agreement, “then we call on them to roll up their sleeves and join their colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic in improving its implementation and enforcement, as opposed to acting as disinterested observers”.

In September, the Commission named a list of improvements it wants the US government to make to the one-year-old agreement. But the EU executive said that EU citizens’ data is protected when companies transfer it to the US using the deal.

So far, more than 2,000 companies have signed up to the privacy shield agreement, which allows them to move commercial data from the EU to the US if they guarantee they will uphold consumes’ privacy. It is a tailor-made deal that officials from the European Commission and the US Department of Commerce discussed for almost three years.

Privacy shield makes it easier for companies to operate in both the US and the EU: there can be no blanket data transfers from the EU to the US without the deal because American laws do not meet the strict EU data protection standards.

DigitalEurope’s rebuke of the national watchdogs marks a sharpening of the tech industry’s critique of how the agreement is monitored.

The Commission is the only EU body responsible for negotiating privacy shield with the US government, but national data protection authorities have power to stop the deal. They can file lawsuits against the agreement if they determine that EU citizens’ data is no longer protected when it travels to servers in the US.

Tech companies have argued that privacy shield is the channel for billions of euros in transatlantic trade, and that authorities should protect it from any legal action that could cause it to be repealed.

In the report they published on Tuesday, the national data protection authorities made it clear that they have already discussed legal action against privacy shield.

The watchdogs said the Commission should “restart discussions” with the US. They warned that if the US government does not make a number of changes by 25 May 2018, they will “take appropriate action, including bringing the Privacy Shield Adequacy decision to national courts”, which could then be sent to the European Court of Justice.

Such a step could spell the end of the data transfer deal: in 2015, the ECJ ruled that the predecessor to privacy shield, the EU-US safe harbour agreement, was illegal. After that decision, companies scrambled to find alternative legal methods to keep transferring consumer data out of the EU.

Watchdogs from EU countries said in the report that the US government must by next May appoint an independent ombudsperson, an official who will oversee consumers’ complaints. Negotiators agreed in 2016 that the new position would be set up in the US Department of State. The Trump administration has not yet named a permanent official for the job.

National data protection authorities also want rules on how privacy shield operates to be declassified by next May.

A Commission spokesman said that the watchdogs’ report “confirms the relevance of the Commission’s recommendations for further improvements”.

The Commission has also criticised the Trump administration for failing to appoint an ombudsperson, but did not set a strict deadline for filling the role.

“The Commission has already started the process of working with the US administration to address the concerns. Commissioner Jourová sent letters to US Secretaries Ross, Sessions and Tillerson urging them to do the necessary improvements, including on the Ombudsman, as soon as possible,” the spokesman said, referring to US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, whose department oversees the privacy shield agreement, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

EU officials are in discussions with their US counterparts ahead of the second annual review of the privacy shield agreement, which is expected to take place in autumn 2018.

The expected timing of the meeting means that the privacy shield agreement could face lawsuits in Europe if the US government does not appoint an ombudsperson and meet the European data protection authorities’ other demands before officials gather again for a second official review.