If a community is resilient, it can withstand and recover from an unanticipated disaster, like an earthquake, fire or flood.

But since every disaster and every community is unique, a uniform measure for defining “resilience” has been hard to come by for engineers and social scientists.

In a new study, Colorado State University civil engineer Hussam Mahmoud offers an innovative approach to defining resilience that could help communities better prepare for hazards. Integrating a community’s infrastructural, social and economic features, Mahmoud’s team has created a dynamic mathematical model that quantifies, in space and time, how well a community would withstand a major shakeup – regardless of whether it’s a natural disaster like a flood, or a social disruption like the Arab Spring in 2011.

Mahmoud and graduate student co-author Akshat Chulahwat describe their “hazard-agnostic,” finite element resilience model in the journal Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering.

Finite element analysis is a mathematical tool that engineers use to assess stresses and strain in structural elements, like beams and columns. Mahmoud and Chulahwat’s work is built on the principle that a community – be it a town, city or suburb – responds to a disaster very much like a swinging pendulum or vibrating violin string responds to a force.

“Our mathematical formula allows you to cause disruption to a community at any location, and see what that disruption would do to the entire community,” said Mahmoud, associate professor of civil engineering.

To demonstrate the versatility of their model, the team used the fictional city of Batman, Gotham City, as a test bed. They chose a fictional city to provide a proof-of-concept for their model.

Many engineers and social scientists are working to define community resilience. Mahmoud is one of them, as a member of the CSU-led NIST Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning. Typically, resilience is viewed as an engineering, social or economic problem, and individual communities decide which metrics matter most to them. The metrics usually fall into a series of “lifelines,” like water, housing, power, health, community and transportation.

In Mahmoud and Chulahwat’s approach, recovery of all lifelines is integrated to form a unified resilience metric. The metric combines engineering, social and economic features of the lifelines together, as opposed to selecting only one of them.

The approach applies these same lifelines, but simplifies resilience into three classes: social, economic and infrastructure. Using an equation from classical mechanics, the team considered mass to represent social vulnerabilities; damping to represent funds available for recovery; and stiffness to represent robustness of infrastructure

If one or more of these variables experiences a change, the rest of the system follows suit – just like when a violin string is plucked, the force of the plucking affects the time it takes for the string to stop vibrating.

They verified their model using a map of the fictional Batman home city. Dividing Gotham into uptown, midtown and downtown, they recorded the effects of various “disasters,” including a jail riot at Arkham Asylum, which is located near uptown Gotham.

Among their observations was that a fast recovery is not necessarily best; if a community bounces back too quickly from a disruption, it can cause instabilities.

Mahmoud was inspired to take this approach to defining resilience in part by studying the Arab Spring uprising of 2011 in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East. The widespread demonstrations lasted many weeks and took social and economic tolls on communities for years, but the impact was difficult to measure.

The new hazard-agnostic model provides a framework for better defining how disruptions like the Arab Spring affect communities long term.

“Our model can help us determine what happens to your community, both spatially and temporally, if it’s struck by a natural disaster, economic downturn or social disruption,” Mahmoud said.

Black adolescents express depressive symptoms differently than people from other age and racial groups, requiring that clinicians take this into account when developing treatment plans, according to a new study led by a Rutgers University-Camden researcher.

“Adolescent depression is a dire public concern in the United States, and even greater concern among Black adolescents, where, if left untreated, can disproportionately lead to an escalation of various mental disorders, academic failure, and related issues,” says Wenhua Lu, an assistant professor of childhood studies at Rutgers University-Camden.

Lu and fellow researchers Michael Lindsey of New York University, Sireen Irsheild of University of Chicago, and Von Eugene Nebbitt of Washington University examine the conceptualization of depression among Black adolescents and make recommendations for improving treatment in the study, “Psychometric Properties of the CES-D Among Black Adolescents in Public Housing,” newly published in the November 2017 issue of the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research.

According to their findings, Black adolescents experiencing depressive symptoms tend to express their depressed feelings by complaining about conflicts with others and physical pains.

“When assessing and treating Black adolescents’ depression, clinicians need to pay particular attention to their complaints about interpersonal struggles and physical discomfort,” concluded Lu. “Treatments such as interpersonal psychotherapy may work better for this population.”

The researchers note the great significance of determining these depressive symptoms among Black adolescents. Previous studies, they explain, have shown that Black adolescents who live in disadvantaged community environments – for example, urban public housing – are more likely to experience elevated levels of substance abuse, violence, and poverty.

“Black adolescents who are exposed to such environmental and social risk factors without sufficient social-support networks are at a higher risk of depression,” said Lu.

Furthermore, say the researchers, youth who have been diagnosed with depression are six times more likely to commit suicide than their peers, and Black youth have a much higher suicide rate than their White peers.

“It is imperative, therefore, to identify the unique ways Black adolescents express depressive symptoms, and calibrate existing assessment tools to improve their psychometric property for this population,” the researchers write in the study.

A total of 792 Black adolescents, ages 11 to 21, who lived in nine public housing developments in four major U.S. cities (including two in North Philadelphia), participated in the study. Adolescents completed a survey that contained a mixture of 20 negatively and positively worded items – such as such as “I felt sad,” “I enjoyed life,” “My appetite was poor,” and “People are unfriendly to me” – in the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D).

Lu explained that the CES-D is a commonly used self-report tool to assess depressive symptoms in community-based populations, and the 20 items are usually grouped into four major domains: depression affect, somatic symptoms, interpersonal relations, and positive affect.

“However, this scale was developed primarily to assess clinical depression among White adults,” said Lu. “It has not been fully validated as a screening tool in Black adolescents.”

Several months ago, a couple of caricatures went viral on social media. In one of those caricatures, Donald Trump was depicted as a child sitting on a chair and Vladimir Putin was shown whispering something into Trump’s ears from behind. In the other, Trump was portrayed as sitting in Steve Bannon’s lap and the latter was shown mumbling into Trump’s ears, “Who is the big boy now?” And Trump was shown replying, “I am a big boy.”

The meaning conveyed by those cunningly crafted caricatures was to illustrate that Trump lacks the intelligence to think for himself and that he is being manipulated and played around by Putin and Bannon. Those caricatures must have affronted the vanity of Donald Trump to an extent that after the publication of those caricatures, he became ill-disposed towards Putin and fired Bannon from his job as the White House chief strategist in August last year.

Donald Trump is an impressionable man-child whose vocabulary does not extend beyond a few words and whose frequent typographical errors on his Twitter timeline, such as ‘unpresidented’ and ‘covfefe’ have made him a laughing stock for journalists and social media users alike. These spelling mistakes reveal that though fond of watching news and talk shows on the American conservative television channels, like the Fox News, but Trump isn’t much of a reader.

It is very easy for the neuroscientists on the payroll of corporate media to manipulate the minds of such puerile politicians and to lead them by the nose to toe the line of political establishments, particularly on foreign policy matters. Nevertheless, it would be pertinent to mention here that unlike dyed-in-the-wool politicians, like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who cannot look past beyond the tunnel vision of political establishments, it appears that Donald Trump is familiar with alternative news perspectives, such as Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, no matter how racist and xenophobic.

Though far from being its diehard ideologue but Donald Trump has been affiliated with the infamous white supremacist ‘alt-right’ movement, which regards Islamic terrorism as an existential threat to America’s security. Trump’s recent tweet slamming Pakistan for playing a double game in Afghanistan and providing safe havens to the Afghan Taliban on its soil reveals his uncompromising and hawkish stance on terrorism.

Many political commentators on the Pakistani media are misinterpreting the tweet as nothing more than a momentary tantrum of a fickle US president, who wants to pin the blame of Washington’s failures in Afghanistan on Pakistan. But along with the tweet, the Trump administration has also withheld a tranche of $255 million US assistance to Pakistan, which shows that it wasn’t ‘just a tweet’ but a carefully considered policy of the new US administration to persuade Pakistan to toe Washington’s line in Afghanistan.

Moreover, it would be pertinent to mention here that In a momentous decision in July last year, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was disqualified from holding public office by the country’s Supreme Court on the flimsy pretext of holding an ‘Iqama’ (a work permit) for a Dubai-based company. Although it is generally assumed the revelations in the Panama Papers, that Nawaz Sharif and his family members own offshore companies, led to the disqualification of the prime minister, but another important factor that contributed to the downfall of Nawaz Sharif is often overlooked.

In October 2016, one of Pakistan’s leading English language newspapers, Dawn News, published an exclusive report [1] dubbed as the ‘Dawn Leaks’ in Pakistan’s press. In the report titled ‘Act against militants or face international isolation,’ citing an advisor to the prime minister, Tariq Fatemi, who has since been fired from his job for disclosing the internal deliberations of a high-level meeting to the media, the author of the report Cyril Almeida contended that in a huddle of Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership, the civilian government had told the military’s top brass to withdraw its support from the militant outfits operating in Pakistan, specifically from the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad.

After losing tens of thousands of lives to terror attacks during the last decade, an across the board consensus has developed amongst Pakistan’s mainstream political forces that the policy of nurturing militants against regional adversaries has backfired on Pakistan and it risks facing international isolation due to belligerent policies of Pakistan’s security establishment. Not only Washington, but Pakistan’s ‘all-weather ally’ China, which plans to invest $62 billion in Pakistan via its China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) projects, has also made its reservations public regarding Pakistan’s continued support to the aforementioned jihadist groups.

Thus, excluding a handful of far-right Islamist political parties that are funded by the Gulf’s petro-dollars and historically garner less than 10% votes of Pakistan’s electorate, all the civilian political forces are in favor of turning a new leaf in Pakistan’s checkered political history by endorsing the government’s decision of an indiscriminate crackdown on militant outfits operating in Pakistan. But Pakistan’s security establishment jealously guards its traditional domain, the security and foreign policy of Pakistan, and still maintains a distinction between the so-called ‘good and bad’ Taliban.

Regarding Pakistan’s duplicitous stance on terrorism, it’s worth noting that there are three distinct categories of militants operating in Pakistan: the Afghanistan-focused Pashtun militants; the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants; and foreign transnational terrorists, including the Arab militants of al-Qaeda, the Uzbek insurgents of Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Chinese Uighur jihadists of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM). Compared to tens of thousands of native Pashtun and Punjabi militants, the foreign transnational terrorists number only in a few hundred and are hence inconsequential.

Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is mainly comprised of Pashtun militants, carries out bombings against Pakistan’s state apparatus. The ethnic factor is critical here. Although the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) like to couch their rhetoric in religious terms, but it is the difference of ethnicity and language that enables them to recruit Pashtun tribesmen who are willing to carry out subversive activities against the Punjabi-dominated state apparatus, while the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants have by and large remained loyal to their patrons in the security agencies of Pakistan.

Although Pakistan’s security establishment has been willing to conduct military operations against the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), which are regarded as a security threat to Pakistan’s state apparatus, but as far as the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, and the Afghanistan-focused Quetta Shura Taliban, including the Haqqani network, are concerned, they are still enjoying impunity because such militant groups are regarded as ‘strategic assets’ by Pakistan’s security agencies.

Therefore, the Sharif administration’s decision that Pakistan must act against the jihadist proxies of the security establishment or risk facing international isolation infuriated the military’s top brass, and consequently, the country’s judiciary was used to disqualify an elected prime minister in order to browbeat the civilian leadership of Pakistan.

Finally, after Trump’s recent outburst against Pakistan, many willfully blind security and defense analysts are suggesting that Pakistan needs to intensify its diplomatic efforts to persuade the new US administration that Pakistan is sincere in its fight against terrorism. But diplomacy is not a pantomime in which one can persuade one’s interlocutors merely by hollow words without substantiating the words with tangible actions.

The double game played by Pakistan’s security agencies in Afghanistan and Kashmir to destabilize its regional adversaries is in plain sight for everybody to discern and feel indignant about. Therefore, Pakistan will have to withdraw its support from the Afghan Taliban and the Punjabi militant groups, if it is eager to maintain good working relations with the Trump administration and wants to avoid economic sanctions and international censure.

Sources and links:
[1] Act against militants or face international isolation, civilians tell military:

The remains of Archbishop Teofilo Camomot of Cebu, a candidate for sainthood, underwent a nine-hour forensic examination this week as part of the process for his possible canonization.

Lawyer Persida Rueda-Acosta, head of a team of forensic experts who examined the remains, expressed surprise that they did not exude a foul smell despite the decay.

“I consider this miraculous because Bishop Camomot’s remains have no foul smell despite the fact that he died almost 30 years ago,” said Rueda-Acosta, head of the government’s Public Attorney’s Office.

Bodies of saints are thought not to decay and to exude a sweet smell when exhumed.

In his report, forensic doctor Erwin Erfe, said the late prelate’s skeleton did not release a distinct smell common in human remains.

He also noted that Archbishop Camomot’s vestments were in “pristine condition” and “uncorrupted by any form of infestation and insect activity.”

The medical team noted that the prelate’s skeleton showed multiple bilateral rib fractures, a fracture to the left clavicle, and extensive cranial and bilateral facial fractures.

The archbishop, who was known for his generosity and work in poor communities, died on Sept. 27, 1988 in a traffic accident.

In November the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints granted a decree of validity to the cause of beatification for the late Filipino archbishop.

A church committee pushing for the late prelate’s beatification, nuns from the Daughters of St. Teresa, and family members, witnessed the examination of the prelate’s remains, which began on Jan. 3.

Archbishop Romulo Valles of Davao, president of the Philippine bishops’ conference who witnessed the examination, extolled Archbishop Camomot’s “virtuous life” in a statement.

“We believe that we have in the person of Bishop Camomot a witness of God’s life in his life and person as he was able to do admirable works of charity, mercy and shepherding of souls in his life,” he said.

Archbishop Camomot was born in Cogon in the central Philippine city of Carcar on March 3, 1914.

He was made auxiliary bishop of Jaro on March 26, 1955. In 1959 he was appointed coadjutor bishop of Cagayan de Oro. He later founded the Carmelite Tertiaries of the Blessed Eucharist, also known as the Daughters of St. Teresa.

In 1968, he become auxiliary bishop of Cebu and parish priest of Carcar in the province of Cebu.

His remains were encased in wax for public viewing in a museum that houses his personal belongings and writings at the Daughters of St. Teresa congregation compound.

By Hata Wahari, Fadzil Aziz and Hadi Azmi

Suspected foreign terrorists should be deported to their home nations rather than sent back to the country they just left, Malaysia’s counter-terrorist police chief said Friday on the sidelines of a an international conference here.

Separately, the director of Malaysia’s prison system told BenarNews at the same meeting that 135 militants linked to the Islamic State (IS) were taking part in a state-run deradicalization process, but only nine have nearly completed phase three of the four-phase program. It was implemented under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) in September 2015.

Under current international law, a person can be deported to the last point of flight embarkation, said Ayob Khan Mydin Pitchay, chief of the national police’s counter-terrorist special branch. Several countries had allowed suspects to choose where they wanted to be sent and many chose Malaysia because of its easy visa rules.

“From 2014 to 2017, nearly 50 suspected foreign terrorists have entered Malaysia. We have arrested and deported about 30 of them,” Ayob told reporters on the sidelines of the Putrajaya International Security Dialogue 2018, a meeting in Malaysia’s administrative capital attended by about 1,000 representatives and experts from 20 countries.

“We are still tracking the others and some may have left the country,” he said.

Ayob did not specify the nationalities of the suspects.

“If the country that deported them – who I cannot name – had instead informed us, the police could have detected them,” Ayob said, adding that such information could have helped counter-terrorism officials arrest and deport the militants.

The two-day international conference, which runs through Saturday, is focusing on how nations can pool their experience of “wisdom and moderation in countering terrorism.”

Malaysia’s Home Ministry and Rabitah Al-Alam Al-Islami (the Muslim World League), a Saudi Arabia-based think-tank, co-organized the event, which runs through Saturday. The 18 other countries participating at the conference include Indonesia, Singapore, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Australia, France and Britain.

Borneo spotlight

Part of Friday’s conference program focused on the Malaysian state of Sabah on Borneo island. Suspected militants, including many allegedly linked to the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), have been arrested in the coastal town of Sandakan, home to ferry services to the southern Philippines.

Sabah has long served as a transit route for foreign militants, including from neighboring Indonesia, Ayob said.

“If they don’t transit from Sabah, they can go to southern Philippines directly from their home country. But it’s a long journey over the Sulawesi Sea,” he said. “So it is much easier to transit from Sabah.”

Yusoph Roque Morales, a member of the Philippines National Commission on Muslim Filipinos, said many foreign militants, especially from Indonesia and Malaysia, had made the southern Philippines their base.

“Normally they have support from the locals. They give the foreigners a place to stay, [and] food, and the local communities accept them,” Morales told the conference. “Malaysians and Indonesians have similarities in terms of culture, food, and communities – and most of them have common social relations like a sultan [community leader] – so that is why Muslim communities in southern Philippines accept Malaysians and Indonesians with open hearts.”

Because they are welcome, some remain and join IS or ASG, he said. Yusoph did not give a specific number, but said thousands of Malaysians and Indonesians had settled in the southern Philippines.

Meanwhile, a Malaysian minister called on other countries to emulate Malaysia’s “soft approach” in countering extremism.

“It should be tackled in a balanced way from all sorts of angles including education and economic. In this regard, Malaysia has been a leading country when it comes to dealing with such issues compared to other countries, which are facing problems such as starvation and deprivation of education, which then leads people to extremism,” said Asyraf Wajdi Dusuki, the deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s Department in charge of Islamic affairs.

Terrorists in Malaysia

Over the last four years, Malaysian authorities arrested 369 people for suspected links to terror groups, according to government statistics compiled by BenarNews.

In October, Ayob told reporters that 70 foreign fighters had been detained by Malaysian officials since 2013. Nine were suspected ASG members thought to have been in contact with Mahmud Ahmad, a Malaysian militant considered the IS recruiter in Southeast Asia.

In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte had declared that Mahmud was among militants killed in the southern city of Marawi during a five-month battle that left more than 1,100 people dead, including more than 900 militants.

Ayob said counter-terrorism officials are monitoring efforts in the Philippines to attract militants. “The recruitment of foreign fighters to the southern Philippines is not over yet,” he said Friday.

Malaysia, home to about 32 million people including 19.5 million Muslims, has foiled at least nine IS-related bomb plots since 2013, according to officials. Those foiled plots included one that targeted the Southeast Asian Games in Kuala Lumpur in August 2017, police said.

But militants were successful in June 2016, when an IS-linked grenade attack injured eight people at a nightclub in Puchong, near Kuala Lumpur.

Deradicalization program

Prison Director-Gen. Zulkefli Omar said nine of the 135 people detained under POTA nearly two years ago were to be evaluated by the end January to determine if they could be placed in the final phase of the deradicalization program and reintegrated into the community.

“Currently, this militant deradicalization program has not yet been successful because the process is very long and requires evaluation by POTA evaluation committee members,” Zulkefli told BenarNews.

Carried out by government agencies under the Home Ministry – namely the Prisons Department, Royal Malaysia Police and the Malaysia Department of Islamic Development (Jakim) – the program consists of four phases.

Phase one, which covers the first six months, is overseen by the Prisons Department and focuses on orientation; phase two, which runs through month 12, involves de-radicalization activities broken down into three sections by the Prison Department, Home Ministry, Jakim and the police.

Phase three, which runs from month 13 to 20, concentrates on personality reinforcement and self-development; the final phase focuses on reintegrating detainees into society.

Zulkifli said none of the 135 detainees were in the fourth phase, but nine had nearly completed the third phase.

“I can’t reveal the identity of the nine detainees, but they are Malaysians and among those are Malaysians who were headed to Syria and students,” he told BenarNews on Friday.

However, Ayob, the chief of Malaysia’s counter-terrorist special branch, suggested that the two-year program is not long enough to reform people who are placed into it.

“In my opinion, the POTA program is too short and requires very strong evidence to allow those involved in militancy to be detained for a period of two years. But if there is no evidence, the longest a suspect can be detained is only for a month and has to be released,” he told BenarNews. “Police constantly monitor them so they would not be involved again in militant activities.”

Does watching the work of fictional forensic investigators on TV influence viewers? There is a belief that this is the case and that the consequences of people watching shows such as the American crime drama television series “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” are filtering through into real life, a phenomenon that has been called the CSI effect. In the worst case, it is feared, potential criminals will learn how to better conceal a crime from these shows.

In addition, concerns have been expressed that members of U.S. juries may now have excessive expectations regarding the evidence and as a result are more likely to acquit the accused. A team of psychologists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz working under Professor Heiko Hecht have now sounded the all-clear–at least in one respect. In an experimental study, the German researchers have been able to find no evidence of a correlation between watching forensic science TV shows and the ability to get away with committing a crime. This is the first study to look at the question of whether criminals could profit from viewing dramas of this sort.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is a popular U.S. TV series which first hit the small screen in its home country in 2000. It focuses on the characters and the work of a team of forensic crime scene investigators. The effect named for this series was soon applied to any repercussions that it was held such widely-viewed crime shows had with regard to the general public–including criminals, the police, and potential students of forensic medicine.

“Over many years, it was presumed that certain links in this regard exist, although there were no appropriate studies to prove this,” said Dr. Andreas Baranowski. He and his colleagues at Mainz University have now undertaken four separate investigations of related claims with the aim of obtaining the most reliable possible findings.

As a first step, the psychologists took a look at statistics from the databases of the FBI and its German equivalent, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), and compared the crime detection rates during the years preceding the launch of the CSI series with the subsequent rates. Then they asked 24 convicted criminals in prisons for their opinions on series such as CSI and whether they thought such shows could help when it came to escaping prosecution. Thirdly, the researchers put together a complex experimental design to find out whether viewers of TV shows like CSI would, as trial subjects, actually be better equipped to erase the traces of an, in this case, mock crime. Baranowski and his colleagues completed their series of trials in the form of a fourth test, in which a crime was re-enacted with the help of a doll’s house.

No CSI learning effect for criminals

On the whole, the researchers did not find any connection between watching forensic dramas and the ability to successfully avoid detection after committing a crime. However, the male subjects in the fourth part of the experiment performed better than female subjects, and younger subjects better than older subjects while more highly educated subjects did better than less well educated study subjects. Study subjects working in technical professions, primarily men, appear to have certain advantages when it comes to concealing crimes.

Baranowski pointed out it had already been postulated in the past that something like the CSI effect could exist. Starting with Sherlock Holmes and continuing as police procedurals, such as Quincy and Law & Order, appeared on TV, warning voices made themselves heard that the wrong kind of people could benefit from the insights provided.

“Every time something new emerges there are people who focus in one aspect and without a full and proper consideration sense possible risks and thus call for bans.”

The findings in this context can be said to pour cold water on attitudes like this. “We can now dispel certain of the myths that have been coursing through the media and other publications for the past 20 years because we are able to state with relative certainty that people who watch CSI are no better at covering their tracks than other people.”

Inordinate focus on the military threat obscures the larger political impact of China’s rise, which will have a bearing on India’s interests and even security.

By Rajesh Rajagopalan

There is greater recognition today in India of the growing power disparity with China and its impact on Indian security and interests. While this much-delayed recognition is welcome, there is still insufficient appreciation of the full effects of China’s power. Far too often, this disparity is seen only in the context of military security. Though the military power China can bring to bear on India is considerable and it is a real threat to the security of India’s borders, the international political consequences of China’s growing power is less often recognised.

At some level, this focus on military security is understandable. India does have an unresolved border problem with China and the possibility of a military clash cannot be ruled out. The Doklam crisis last year, which is yet to be fully settled, highlighted the possibility of the two sides stumbling into an actual shooting war. India’s military inadequacies, especially its poor border infrastructure, the glacial pace of its military modernisation, its continuing difficulties with generating both inter-service jointness and strategic coordination, contrasts sharply with the rise of China’s military capabilities in general and in the Tibetan plateau in particular. China has always been better at strategic coordination (even if the objectives of its strategy were sometimes short-sighted), and now has far better infrastructure in the area than India does, and the growing sophistication of China’s military forces has eliminated whatever limited technological advantage India had. There is no question that these are reasons for worry.

But inordinate focus on the military threat obscures the larger political impact of China’s rise, which will also have a bearing on India’s interests and even security. There are at least four ways in which this can happen.

The first is that China is likely to garner much greater international political support, especially from the developing world countries of the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. These regions, many with recent experience of colonialism, have traditionally seen multilateral forums as an arena where they could exercise at least a limited amount of influence against the West. The UN General Assembly, for example, was well-known for being both dominated by the developing world and being anti-American in its orientation. This diminished after the end of the Cold War because these countries lost support that the Soviet Union and its allies provided. Consequently, many of these countries were also seeking to curry favour with the US, thus reducing their fervor for symbolic and useless anti-Americanism.

China will find ready and willing support among these countries both because it is now strong enough to stand up to the US and because developing countries now hope China is rich enough to provide the kind of aid and assistance the US is no longer seen as willing or able to provide. And the farther away they are from China, and the less they are subject to direct Chinese pressure, the more likely such sympathies will be. This will quite possibly lead to a new era of activism in multilateral forums, based on China’s support, with the flipside being an overwhelming pro-China coalition in such multilateral forums. The world may not yet be fully bipolar in material sense yet, but its effects may anticipate its actual emergence. Of course, these are instincts that closely tracks with the Nehruvian foreign policy approach in India but even Nehruvians will recognise the dangers for Indian interests when China leads such a developing world coalition. In any disagreement or dispute between India and China, New Delhi’s erstwhile friends in the developing world will either hide under the parapet or side with China. Think of what these “friends” did during the 1971 war, but consider what the consequences will be when this becomes the rule rather than being limited to one episode.

The second political effect, which we are already witnessing but refusing to acknowledge, is that Russia is increasingly beholden to China. This is not India’s doing, not the consequence of any disloyalty to an old friend, or the consequence of India warming up to the US. It is, rather, the consequence of a combination of a number of other factors: most importantly, Russia’s own weakness, but also the effect of Putin’s policies that is leading to greater tensions with both the US and Europe, and of course, China’s rise, which provides Moscow a way to counter the pressures on it from the West. Whatever the combination of these factors, New Delhi needs to recognise the fact that China’s rise provides Russia a necessary friend, and a value that India cannot hope to match. Moscow and New Delhi have shared a relationship of mutual strategic empathy and that makes it difficult for Indian strategists to see the obvious diplomatic trends. There is a whistling-in-the-dark quality to India’s refusal to look at the change in Russia’s orientation but the danger of continuing to depend on Russia is only going to grow.

A third political effect will be on the various multilateral political groupings such as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), RIC (Russia, India, China) and SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) that India has invested in. These are already dominated by China, and this will only increase in the coming years. New Delhi should not be foolish to expect that countries like Brazil or South Africa or Russia will side with India in any disagreement that it has with China. India should expect to be increasingly isolated within these bodies, as China seeks to use these to shape its own hegemony. India can, of course, push back either by standing alone and letting the consensus rule scuttle anything unpalatable or by convincing others to stick to non-controversial areas, though the latter would also require China’s acceptance.

A final political effect, though one that has gained greater attention than the above three, is China’s capacity to influence India’s neighbours. This should not be a surprise: India’s dominance within the region represents a latent security concern, if not a threat, to the smaller states in the region, much like China’s power is a threat to its neighbours and to the rest of Asia. There is little that is unnatural about such concerns — or about these countries trying to balance it by seeking the help of powers from outside the region. This will not be the first India is facing this: much to New Delhi’s resentment, most of India’s neighbours have attempted to do so in the past, though they have rarely been able to attract any consistent partners, with Pakistan being the only exception. India should expect much more of this now because China will be interested in exploiting the natural concern of India’s smaller neighbours in a more consistent manner than other extra-regional powers have been until now.

What these effects suggest is that the question is not just of the disparity of power between India and China but of the consequences of China’s global power too. Disparity of power is a security issue: the greater the disparity, the greater the security problem. But even substantial disparity in power does not necessarily have to lead to wider political effects if the stronger power is not a significant global actor. But China is, and even without becoming a hegemonic actor, the global effects of its power can impact on India (and China’s other neighbours) in a manner that needs to be better recognised.

By Pushpita Das*

The publication of the first draft of the updated National Register of Citizens (NRC) of Assam by the Office of the State Coordinator of NRC on December 31, 2017 is an important milestone in dealing with the influx of illegal migrants from Bangladesh into that state. The objective behind updating and publishing the 1951 NRC is to compile a list of the names of genuine Indian citizens residing in Assam and, in the process, detect foreigners (read Bangladeshis) who may have illegally entered the state after March 24, 1971. Of the 3.29 crore residents of Assam1 who applied for the inclusion of their names in the NRC by submitting legacy documents,2 1.9 crore names have been included as citizens in the initial list. A second list containing the names of more numbers of citizens is slated to be published in February-March 2018. The final list containing the names of all Indian citizens in Assam is expected to be published by December 2018 after the disposal of all claims and objections in final registers at various levels.

The publication of the initial NRC list is the outcome of a long standing demand of the Assamese people to detect and deport illegal Bangladeshi migrants from their state. Early demands for the detection of foreigners based on the NRC of 1951 can be found in the memorandum submitted by the All Assam Students Union (AASU) to the then Prime Minister on February 2, 1980 as well as in the signed petition submitted by 17 members of the legislative assembly (MLAs) of Assam to the Rajya Sabha in June 1980. Yet, the Assam Accord of 1985 did not contain any specific mention of updating the NRC. With regard to the issue of illegal Bangladeshi migrants, clause 5.8 of the Accord merely stipulated that “Foreigners who came to Assam on or after March 25, 1971 shall continue to be detected, deleted and expelled in accordance with law. Immediate and practical steps shall be taken to expel such foreigners.” In the absence of any expressed demand for updating the NRC of 1951 (a charge denied by AASU leaders), the Government of India took no initiative in this regard. Instead, it constituted a number of Tribunals and Appellate Courts under both the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act of 19833 and the Foreigners Tribunal Act of 1964 to detect illegal Bangladeshis.

It was only in May 2005 that the first step towards updating the NRC of 1951 was taken, when a tripartite meeting between the Centre, the Assam government and AASU was held to review the progress made in the implementation of the Assam Accord. At that meeting, it was decided that the Assam government will take up and complete within two years the process of updating the NRC of 1951 by including the names that appear in the 1971 voters’ lists and those of their descendants. Yet, no efforts were made either by the State government or the Union government in subsequent years to update the NRC. The issue was again raised by AASU at the April 2009 review meeting, on which occasion the Assam government gave an assurance that it would start the process of updating the NRC. Following the assurance, in June 2010 a pilot project was initiated in two revenue circles – Barpeta and Chayagaon. However, the project was suspended following violent protests by the All Assam Minority Students Union (AAMSU), which alleged that there were numerous anomalies in the NRC.

Whereas successive governments have been extremely reluctant to update the NRC of 1951 due to various political considerations and vested interests, the Hon’ble Supreme Court took up the matter in earnestness when the issue was brought before it. In the course of hearing a clutch of writ petitions filed by various parties, especially the one by Assam Public Works, an NGO, in July 2009 in which it had prayed for the deletion of illegal voters from the voters’ list of Assam and sought updation of the NRC as part of that process, the Supreme Court, brushing aside the delaying tactics of the Union and state governments, ordered them to begin the process of updating of the NRC in Assam. Accordingly, the Ministry of Home Affairs, in consultation with the Ministry of Law and Justice, issued the notification for starting the work of updating the NRC and appointed Prateek Hajela on January 28, 2014 as the State Coordinator for the NRC. For its part, the Supreme Court constituted a Committee “to take care of any clarification that would be required with regard to the modalities in the preparation of the NRC.” Initially, the date for publication of the final draft of the NRC was set as on or before January 1, 2016. But upon the request of the State Coordinator, the Court agreed to extend the deadline by two years.

The publication of the first draft has not been met with any violent protest as anticipated. However, it has raised serious apprehensions in the minds of those whose names do not figure in the list. The fact that only some of the names of the members of a single family appeared on the list while others did not has also raised doubts about the rigour of the verification process. But the hope that their names might appear in the next list has kept them from protesting violently against the NRC. Given that a proper documentation system does not exist in the country, for most of those whose names do not appear in the NRC, procuring the required documents, especially birth certificates, in order to prove their relationships with persons whose names have appeared in the legacy documents and thus establish their citizenship is fraught with difficulties. This is particularly so in the case of many settlers who have come to Assam from other parts of the country. State governments to which documents were sent for verification have been slow to respond. So far, only 1.5 lakh of the 5.5 lakh documents sent out for verification have been reportedly returned by other state governments. Given these hurdles, and especially the delay caused by the slow disposal of cases by other state governments, it is to be seen when the next iteration of the list would be published, how many names appear therein and whether the government would be able to publish the final NRC by the end of 2018.

An even more important issue is what happens to those people whose names do not figure in the final NRC and are declared illegal entrants into the state. The popular rhetoric for dealing with such illegal migrants has always been to deport them to Bangladesh, but this is easier said than done. Bangladesh has consistently denied that its citizens have illegally emigrated to India. Although the Supreme Court in its order of 2014 had instructed the Government of India to enter into discussions with Bangladesh on streamlining the deportation of illegal Bangladeshis, nothing has happened on the ground as New Delhi is reluctant to raise this tricky issue lest it jeopardises relations with Dhaka. In the absence of any agreement under which Bangladesh agrees to take back its citizens, the Government of India cannot do much except push a few illegal migrants across the border. The situation is further compounded by that fact that many illegal migrants who were declared foreigners by the Foreigners Tribunals have either absconded to other states to evade arrest or are dead. Since the deportation of illegal migrants is not feasible, the only option before the government is to let them reside in the country on humanitarian grounds but after stripping them of all citizenship rights. Such an option, however, might not go down well with the people of Assam who are at present protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Bill of 2016, which proposes to grant citizenship to all refugees (except Muslims) who have fled religious persecution in their home countries.

The publication of the updated NRC is indeed a positive step in so far as it puts to rest wild speculations about the extent of the illegal migrant population in Assam and the resulting polarisation that political parties have been exploiting to make electoral gains. However, the absence of any clear policy as to how to deal with the proclaimed illegal migrants has created a sense of unease in the minds of many presently residing in Assam. Further, while the NRC is being updated for Assam, there is no plan to prepare similar NRCs for the other states in the North East where illegal migration continues to be a volatile issue. The need of the hour therefore is for the Union Government to allay apprehensions presently in the minds of the people of Assam and take steps to contain any adverse fallout after the publication of the final draft of the NRC. At the same time, it also needs to spell out what it intends to do with the persons whose names do not figure in the final NRC.

Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India.

About the author
*Dr. Pushpita Das is Research Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi.

Source:
This article was published by IDSA

Notes:

• 1. According to the 2011 Census, the total population of Assam is 3.12 crore.
• 2. The NRC of 1951 and the Electoral Roll of 1971 (up to midnight of 24 March 1971) are together called Legacy Data. Persons whose names appeared in these documents and their descendants are certified as Indian citizens.
• 3. The IMDT Act of 1983 was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2005 and all the pending cases in IMDT courts were transferred to the Foreigners Tribunals of 1964.

The spots on the surface on the Sun come and go with an 11-year periodicity known as the solar cycle. The solar cycle is driven by the solar dynamo, which is an interplay between magnetic fields, convection and rotation.

However, our understanding of the physics underlying the solar dynamo is far from complete. One example is the so-called Maunder Minimum, a period in the 17th century, where spots almost disappeared from the surface of the Sun for a period of over 50 years.

A Rossetta Stone for stellar dynamos

Now, a large international team led by Christoffer Karoff from Aarhus University has found a star that can help shed light on the physics underlying the solar dynamo. The star is located 120 light years away in the constellation of Cygnus, and on the surface, the star looks just like the Sun: it has the same mass, radius and age – but inside, the chemical composition of the star is very different. It consists of around twice as many heavy elements as in the Sun. Heavy elements here means elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.

The team has succeeded in combining observations from the Kepler spacecraft with ground-based observations dating as far back as 1978, thereby reconstructing a 7.4-year cycle in this star.

“The unique combination of a star almost identical to the Sun, except for the chemical composition, with a cycle that has been observed from both the Kepler spacecraft and from ground makes this star a Rosetta Stone for the study of stellar dynamos.” explained Karoff.

Heavy elements make the star more variable

By combining photometric, spectroscopic and asteroseismic data, the team collected the most detailed set of observations for a solar-like cycle in any star other than the Sun. The observations revealed that the amplitude of the cycle seen in the star’s magnetic field is more than twice as strong as what is seen on the Sun, and the cycle is even stronger in visible light.

This allowed the team to conclude that more heavy elements make a stronger cycle. Based on models of the physics taking place in the deep interior and the atmosphere of the star, the team was also able to propose an explanation of the stronger cycle.

Actually, they came up with a two-part explanation. First, the heavy elements make the star more opaque, which changes the energy transport deep inside the star from radiation to convection. This makes the dynamo stronger, affecting both the amplitude of the variability in the magnetic field and the rotation pattern near the surface. The latter effect was also measured. Second, the heavy elements affect the processes on the surface and in the atmosphere of the star. Specifically, the contrast between diffuse bright regions called faculae and the quiet solar background increases as the mix of heavy elements is increased. This makes the cyclic photometric variability of the star stronger.

Can help us understand how the Sun affects our climate

The new study can help us understand how the irradiance of the Sun has changed over time, which is likely to have an effect on our climate. In general special attention is paid to the Maunder Minimum, which coincided with a period of relatively cold climate, especially in Northern Europe. The new measurements offer an important constraint on the models trying to explain the weak activity and possible reduced brightness of the Sun during the Maunder minimum.

By Ramesh Jaura

There was an air of surprise when religious leaders and representatives of civil society, officials of State and international organizations, eminent academics, Nobel Laureates, and students, gathered in the Vatican City against the backdrop of an escalating face-off between the U.S. and North Korea.

Surprise because for the first time the Vatican’s newly created Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development was hosting a Conference on the ‘Perspectives for a World Free from Nuclear Weapons and for Integral Disarmament’.

Since the two-day Conference, officially described as International Symposium, concluded on November 11, 2017, there has been a breeze of expectation. A senior official of the lay Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai International (SGI), Hirotsugu Terasaki explains why. He is Director General of Peace and Global Issues at the SGI headquarters in Tokyo, Japan.

The SGI – a community-based association with 12 million members around the world and a 60-year record of peace activities aimed at the abolition of nuclear weapons – was the only Buddhist organization among 13 groups that joined the landmark Vatican conference.

Other cooperating organizations were the Embassy of Italy to the Holy See, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Germany, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Japan, the Interdisciplinary Center “Sciences for Peace” (CISP) at the University of Pisa, Georgetown University, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies of the Keough School of Global Affairs, Mazda Motor Europe GmbH, Notre Dame University, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, Senzatomica, and the Italian Union of Scientists for Disarmament.

The significance of SGI’s participation in the Vatican conference is underlined by the fact that it has been actively partaking in the initiative launched by Faith Communities Concerned about Nuclear Weapons. It issued overall eight joint statements to the UN General Assembly, the NPT Review Conference, and the negotiations on a nuclear weapons ban, which resulted in the United Nations General Assembly adopting the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) urging the prohibition and complete elimination of nuclear weapons.

Likewise, Pope Francis issued a statement to both the 2014 Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons and the TPNW negotiating conference.

Expectation is also sparked by the fact that the Vatican Conference was the first major global gathering on disarmament since July 7, 2017 when 122 countries adopted the TPNW. The Treaty springs from unrelenting efforts of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize awardee, backed by 468 partner organizations in 101 countries including the faith-based organizations (FBOs).

Honouring Nobel Peace Laureate ICAN

In a message on the occasion of the Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony in honour of ICAN in Oslo on December 10, 2017, SGI Director General of Peace and Global Issues Terasaki said: “Since 2007, the SGI has been proud to work as an international partner of ICAN toward our common goal of the total elimination of nuclear weapons.”

Terasaki’s expectation also derives from the fact that TPNW has clearly defined the ultimate goal of humankind – the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons. SGI is convinced that, to achieve this goal, there is no option but to continue to move forward with undeterred persistence while strengthening effective linkages with the NPT regime – the cornerstone of international nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation efforts.

Besides, the Vatican Conference was held at a point in time when a robust push is vital to mobilising at least 50 countries to ratify the TPNW, which opened for signature on September 20, 2017, noted Terasaki in an interview with IDN-INPS, adding that the Conference was part of the Catholic Church’s resolve to achieve that goal.

A Vatican source said, the Conference was intended to sensitise archbishops across the globe about the devastating impact of nuclear weapons. With this in view, the conference programme had been designed as an educational tool. Not the least because the role of peace and disarmament education is referred to in the Preamble to the nuclear weapon ban treaty. Article 12 calls for efforts to universalize the Treaty.

“Making the voices of civil society heard is the only way to influence policy makers so as to bring about change. For this, disarmament education is necessary,” said Terasaki. “Unless people are informed about disarmament issues enabling them understand the reality of the nuclear issue and raise their voices, politicians would not change their mind sets,” he added.

He said he had asked SGI Italy members about Italy’s nuclear sharing policy with the U.S. But he was told that almost no one knew about the two locations where the NATO (American) nuclear weapons are stored in Italy.

Nuclear sharing is a concept in NATO’s policy of nuclear deterrence, which involves member countries without nuclear weapons of their own in the planning for the use of nuclear weapons by NATO. In particular it provides for the armed forces of these countries to be involved in delivering these weapons in the event of their use.

Close observers of the situation suggest that most of the Italians are unaware of what nuclear sharing is all about, just as most Germans are about tactical nuclear weapons stored under U.S. command in the country.

Use and possession of nuclear weapons deserves condemnation

The SGI Director General of Peace and Global Issues is convinced that the Catholic Church is committed to spreading through civil society organizations and churches, the Pope’s clear message that the use and possession of nuclear weapons deserves condemnation since they are indiscriminate and disproportionate instruments of war.

“What we face, ultimately, is not a confrontation between the states that possess nuclear weapons and those that do not. Rather, it is the confrontation between the threat posed by nuclear weapons and humanity’s right to life. Nuclear weapons are dangerous from a security perspective,” noted Terasaki.

“From an ethical and moral perspective, they are wrong. This renders them unacceptable in any hands. Today, with the geopolitical risks of nuclear conflict at almost unprecedented levels, it is vital that this awareness be shared widely by all people,” Terasaki added.

From his perspective, the conference marked a starting point to provide a tailwind to robust civil societies for a push towards the abolition of nuclear weapons.

How did other Conference participants view the Buddhist organization SGI’s participation? The SGI’s Director General of Peace and Global Issues said: “Aware that the Vatican was hosting the Conference, we anticipated that there would be many Christian participants. Therefore, as the sole Buddhist participant, we decided to first introduce the Buddhist perspective of life and then explain how it is related to our movement regarding the abolition of nuclear weapons.

“We were told by many participants that they found SGI Vice President Hiromasa Ikeda’s speech well-structured so that everyone could be empathetic about our approach.” Ikeda described SGI approach as ‘expanding the reach of empathy.’

Keen to enlist the support of the young generation for a nuke-free world, the Conference organisers – Cardinal Peter Turkson, Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, and Archbishop Silvano Maria Tomasi – asked SGI to share its experiences.

Archbishop Tomasi, whom Terasaki first met at the 2014 Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, when he was the Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations in Geneva, is at present delegate secretary to the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.

SGI, the youth, nuke-free world

As one of a few movements focusing also on the youth, SGI has been galvanising the support of the young generation for a world free of nuclear weapons.

In SGI’s presentation to the Conference on November 11, 2017, Vice President Ikeda briefly explained how SGI has supported efforts by young people to record war experiences, in particular those of the hibakusha. This provides an opportunity for youth to learn about the realities of war and nuclear weapons. But even more, it is through such encounter and dialogue that young people can develop and grow as leaders.

“Through such activities, we have sought to involve a broad spectrum of participation and to develop youth leadership,” Ikeda said in his presentation to the Conference.

He also stressed in his remarks the need to “help people awaken from the mad nightmare” of nuclear deterrence, by which the world’s citizens are held hostage and “peace” is maintained by a balance of terror.

“We need to awaken people from the present nightmare with the bright lights of a new vision. Concepts such as integral disarmament, human security and human development all indicate the orientation for such a vision,” Ikeda added.

“Within the disarmament field, humanitarian concerns have provided such orientation. They have helped introduce a human perspective to the security discourse. The humanitarian discourse has led to an explicit recognition within the international community of the impermissible nature of nuclear weapons, contributing importantly to the realization of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW),” he continued.

Ikeda’s remarks underlined a broad-based commonality of views between the SGI and Pope Francis and the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. This gives rise to the expectation that the encounter in the Vatican City has planted the seeds of cooperation between Nichiren Buddhism and the Roman Catholic Church to prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons.

The above article is based on an interview with Hirotsugu Terasaki, the Director General of Peace and Global Issues of the lay Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai International (SGI), in Tokyo, Japan. SGI was the sole Buddhist organization that participated in the Vatican Conference on nuclear disarmament on November 10-11, 2017.

By Die Morina

Moshe Harel, an Israeli citizen accused of being involved in organ-trafficking from Kosovo’s Medicus clinic in 2008, was arrested in Cyprus after years of being listed as wanted by Interpol.

One of the main suspects in Kosovo’s Medicus clinic case, Moshe Harel, has been arrested on suspicion of involvement in organ-trafficking, police in Pristina told BIRN on Saturday.

Is not clear however if an extradition request has been filed by the Kosovo authorities yet.

“Kosovo Police have information that based on an international warrant arrest, the suspect M.H., who has been wanted since 2010, has been arrested days ago in Cyprus,” Kosovo Police spokesperson Baki Kelani told BIRN.

In July 2017, Pristina Basic Court started the retrial of Medicus clinic owner Lutfi Dervishi, his son Arban Dervishi and head anaesthetist Sokol Hajdini, all accused of involvement in organised crime in connection with people-trafficking.

In March 2016, Kosovo’s appeals court had confirmed their convictions, jailing Lutfi Dervishi and his son for eight years and Hajdini for five. But a Supreme Court ruling overturned the original verdict on the basis of procedural irregularities.

The ruling said found that “multiple illegal kidney transplants” took place at the clinic in 2008.

Poor people from Turkey, Russia, Moldova and Kazakhstan were allegedly brought to the clinic after being assured that they would receive up to 15,000 euro for their kidneys.

The EULEX prosecutor in the case said then that transplant recipients, mainly Israelis, paid more than 70,000 euro for the kidneys.

Harel was also charged in Israel in 2015 with international organ-trafficking and organising illegal transplants, alongside six others.

“The accused ran a real business in trafficking organs, on dozens of occasions over the course of years, exploiting the financial distress of the donors and the health crisis of the recipients for economic gain,” the Israeli justice ministry said at the time.

As well as Harel, a Turkish doctor, Yusuf Sonmez, is still wanted in the Medicus case but remains at large.

Police initially raided the Medicus clinic in 2008 after a Turkish man whose kidney had been removed was found seriously ill at Pristina airport.

The clinic was also mentioned in a Council of Europe report which alleged that elements of the Kosovo Liberation Army traded the organs of prisoners during the 1999 conflict.

These and other allegations eventually led to the establishment of the new Hague-based Specialist Chambers, which will try former KLA fighters for wartime and post-war crimes, although it has yet to issue any indictments.

Investigators closed down the Medicus clinic in 2008, and it has since been sold.

In mid-November 1916, Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov posed a question which is increasingly being heard in countries today. Confronted with government policies that represent a betrayal of national interests and even a surrender to enemies, Milyukov and those who follow him now asked “is this stupidity or is this treason?”

Now it is the turn of the Lithuanians. In an essay for the Grani portal today, Grigory and Marina Tregubov call attention to the emergence of a deep and very public split in the Lithuanian government over how best to deal with the aggressive Russian Federation of Vladimir Putin (graniru.org/Politics/World/Europe/m.266759.html).

Earlier this week, Lithuanian Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis called for the renewal of work by the Lithuanian-Russian intergovernmental commission, which has not met since October 2011. Skvernelis said that the lack of dialogue with the Russian side “harms the interests of the state and its citizens.”

President Dalia Grybauskaitė immediately responded, calling his remarks “irresponsible.” Contacts with friendly countries are always a good thing, but Russia routinely violates international law, has invaded its neighbors, and is conducting “a military, information and cyber attack towards others.”

“It would be naïve to think,” she said, “that economic relations with this country are possible and separate from politics [because] Russia has always used its energy, trade and other instruments to exert pressure and influence on other countries. [Lithuania’s] experience only confirms this,” the Lithuanian leader said. Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius supported her.

Skvernelis responded by saying that he “completely shares the position of the president on sanctions, the situation in the Donbass, the annexation of Crimea and ‘the aggressive rhetoric’ of Moscow.” But, he continued, “to have political contacts at lower levels is something that we are obligated to maintain.”

The Tregubovs asked Žygimantas Pavilionis, a Conservative member of the Lithuanian parliament, former ambassador to Washington and one of the initiators of the Lithuanian Magnitsky Law to explain what is going on in Vilnius.

In Vilnius, he explained, there is something called “’the Lithuanian consensus,’” a position that all the parties, right, left and center agree to; and that consensus dictates that “it is impossible to renew a dialogue with Russia on the former basis until Moscow fulfills certain conditions,” including withdrawal from Crimea and other oblasts of Ukraine.

“As long as Russia doesn’t observe the principles of international law,” Pavilionis said,,, “we cannot renew normal dialogue with her. Skvernelis violated that consensus and has now been called up short by the president and foreign minister who under the constitution are responsible for foreign affairs.

It is likely that the prime minister was focusing on domestic elections and sought to distract attention from his own failure to implement promised reforms. “In essence,” Pavilionis said, “his policy is entirely populist, and populists always seek new scandals” to distract attention from problems and attract attention to themselves.

According to the deputy, “this was a very stupid step,” one that will be rejected by all parties in the parliament. And then, he continued, “the prime minister will understand that he has committed a mistake and simply wasn’t able to ‘widely remain silent’ at the right time.” In short, the Lithuanian consensus will hold.

And that consensus will involve not only refraining from talking to Russia until Russia shows it can be a responsible interlocutor but also stepping up the pressure on Moscow by expanding the Magnitsky List and continuing to serve as a refuge for those Russians forced to flee from repression.

“At one time,” Pavilionis said, “many Lithuanians were forced to leave Lithuania. And we still remember this time. We understand how serious this question is for people who want to live in a free country,” and we want to support those in Russia who want it to be a free and law-abiding state.

“This question in fact is very important,” the former ambassador said. “I myself saw Soviet tanks around the TV tower in Vilnius. My friends died there. And I understand how in Russia, which was then still in the Soviet Union, people came out in large demonstrations” against the Kremlin’s policies.

“Russians ethnic and not struggled for our freedom,” Pavilionis said. “You rescued us then. Now, the time has come and we must show you our solidarity not only in words but in our actions.”

Eleven Saudi princes have been arrested after they held a rally to protest a royal decision to make princes pay for their electricity and water consumption and refused to leave the royal palace.

The princes also demanded financial compensation for a ruling against one of their cousins, Saudi news site Sabq and Al Marsad reported on Saturday morning.

They were informed that their actions were wrong and that they should vacate the premises, but they refused to comply. A royal order was issued to the Royal Guard to step in and arrest them ahead of legal action, the sites said.

Sources told the sites that the directives had been to treat all citizens, regardless of their status, equally and as per the rules and regulations.

Original source

By Dr. S. Chandrasekharan

The Mayoral election held for the Rangpur City Corporation on 21st December was the first of the four Municipal elections that are to take place before the General Elections and should normally indicate the trends in voting between the two major parties- the Awami League led by Sheikh Hasina and the BNP led by Khaleda Zia. The only election that was held before was the Mayoral elections on March 30, 2017 to Comilla where the BNP won handsomely.

In the present elections, the Jatiya Party Mayoral candidate Moitafizar Rahman Mustafa won a crushing victory, polling 160,489 votes as against 62,400 votes by the Awami League and the BNP was a poor third with 35,136 votes. The voter turnout was 74.3 percent- a fairly high percentage. Among the councillors, 14 of the Awami League, 7 of the BNP and 2 of the JP got elected. It is said that both the major parties- the Awami League and the BNP were stunned by the unexpected results. Traditionally, Rangpur is a strong hold of the JP and it was expected that the JP would sail through but the margin of victory was truly stunning!

Significance of Rangpur City Elections

The Rangpur City Corporation was significant on many counts. Briefly these were

• With the national general elections one year away and with the major parties putting in all their efforts in the city elections, it was thought, that it would be a precursor to the general elections to be held a year later.
• The election was held with the Shiekh Hasina heading the government and the JP conceded that it was a free and fair election. This is to be seen in the demand of the BNP that the National election should be held under a neutral government and not with a government headed by Hasina,
• Though the BNP complained that this mayoral election was not held in a free and fair manner, the general impression was that it was really free and fair. The BNP showed itself as a “bad loser”
• The Army was not deployed but was available as against the demand of the BNP that Army should be deployed and given magisterial powers to arrest etc. in the coming General elections.
• Use of EVM was made in certain wards on an experimental basis and these machines functioned well. There were no complaints!

The Coming General Elections

Article 123 (3) of the Constitution stipulates that the next General Elections should be held within 90 days of the dissolution of the parliament- here the tenth Parliament. This means that the elections to the eleventh parliament should be held between October 31, 2018 and Jan 28 2019. The present Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has indicated that the elections will be held most probably by next December.

The present Constitution stipulates that the incumbent PM will remain in office till the national polls and till the next Prime Minister is elected. So, Hasina could stay on in office as Prime Minster during the elections and as her party has said that she would help the Election Commissioner in conducting a free and fair polls. She will be constitutionally correct in rejecting the demands of the BNP to step down before the elections.

It is estimated that there will be an addition of 2.30 crores of voters this time than the one held in 2008 and it is indeed a significant increase. Traditionally, the voting pattern between the two main parties the AL and the BNP are even and therefore the choice of the new voters will be decisive.

The Crucial Issue in Conducting the Elections

The Election Commission had invited the representatives of the political parties to discuss on the issues relating to the conduct of the elections. There are differences between the two major parties – the Awami League and the BNP in the conduct of the elections, but the most serious and crucial one appears to be whether the elections should be held under a neutral government in what they call “Polls time Supportive Government”- which perhaps means non partisan government. But the Awami league insists that it should be held as per the constitution- meaning that Hasina’s government will be in power while conducting elections.

There are other differences too like the deployment of the Army and giving them powers of arrest as demanded by the BNP while the Awami League wants the Army to be kept as Strike Forces in aid of civil power as in existing laws ( the Elections Commission thinks that it can be deployed), use of the Electronic Voting machines, fresh demarcation of the constituencies as per pre 2008 elections ( the BNP wants change in the configuration of constituencies while AL is against) etc. But these are surmountable ones and could be resolved but it is certainly going to be tough to resolve the crucial issue as to who leads the government during the elections?

An Inclusive Election?

Whatever be the outcome of the discussions the Election Commission has with the parties, it looks that unlike the previous election, this time it will be an “All Inclusive Election.” The BNP has learnt its lesson and has realised that by its bad decision of staying away from the previous elections it has left its cadres disorganised and frustrated. It is said that seven of the twenty parties that formed an alliance with BNP are also planning to stay away from the alliance.

One would expect that BNP not to indulge in rhetoric and quietly accept the realities and get ready for elections. By its postures and various statements to the contrary, it is leaving its cadres confused and bewildered. Consider the following:

• On 9th November 2017, Moudud Ahmed the standing Committee member of the BNP said that the BNP will participate in the upcoming Parliamentary elections. He added that the Awami League government will be forced to compromise on the BNP’s stand for holding general election under a “supportive government.”
• Khaleda in the court made a statement that cases have been filed against her to make her ineligible for the elections and keep her away from politics! . This means that she intends to participate in the elections.
• On 13Th November 2017, Khaleda declared that there would be no polls under Hasina and elections should be under a non partisan and neutral government.
• On 22nd November 2017, Khaleda in her meeting with the advisory council of the party said that her party would not take part in the next general elections without a neutral poll free government.
• On 25th December, she again said that “it will not be possible to hold a free and fair general election if PM Sheikh Hasina remains in power.”
• Moudud Ahmad said on 1st January that if the incumbent government pays no heed to the demand of an election under a non partisan government, his party would have no alternative but to go for a movement. ( It is quite some time since the party has openly had any movement of significance. Many of its leaders are still going to court and defending themselves for all the violent acts perpetrated in the name of protests since the last election.)
• On 3rd Jan, Khaleda said categorically that her party would contest the national elections but the polls must be held under an interim non partisan administration.

Conclusion

It looks that despite all the rhetoric, BNP will participate in the next elections under the present incumbent government as PM Sheikh Hasina is not going to relent on this issue while on other issues like use of Army, EVMs but not on reconfiguration of the electoral constituencies, she perhaps would.

Both the parties are now seen to be actively engaged in preparing the elections. The BNP has started to organise and activate its leaders and cadres. The Awami league on the other hand is yet to start. I get the impression that Awami league is over confident in view of the fine performance of its government so far but I am afraid that this over confidence itself may be its undoing if they are not careful.

(EurActiv) — Lord Andrew Adonis has urged UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to call for a second referendum so the British public can have their say on the final Brexit deal.

In an exclusive interview with British newspaper The Independent, the former Labour Transport Secretary said it would become “increasingly difficult” for Corbyn to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with Theresa May on Brexit.

Instead he called on the Labour leader to endorse a second referendum so the electorate could decide whether they want to accept the final trade deal with the EU or opt to stay in the trade bloc.

“I’m rather hoping that Jeremy Corbyn will move in the direction of a referendum on the final terms, because it is going to become increasingly difficult for him to stand shoulder to shoulder with Theresa May when the living standards of ordinary and hardworking Brits are being trashed,” Lord Adonis told The Independent.

However, 8 out of 10 Labour members oppose the party leadership’s opposition to a second referendum on an eventual Brexit deal, according to a poll of over 4,000 members of the U.K.’s major political parties.

The survey by the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary University in London, published Thursday, found that 78% of the Labour grassroots either agree or strongly agree with having a second vote — something Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has ruled out.

Lord Adonis’s comments came after his former boss, Tony Blair blamed Labour for giving a confusing stance on Brexit.

The former Prime Minister described the party’s current position as “mistaken” and warned that voters would not find Mr Corbyn’s approach “credible”.

Highlighting senior figures in the current Labour leader’s top team, including John McDonnell, Mr Blair claimed they had apparently made contradictory remarks on the party’s stance.

He concluded that Labour’s “timidity”, alongside Tory right-wingers, would ultimately be to blame if Britain leaves the EU.

Lord Adonis has also been critical of Mr Corbyn and his stance on Brexit in the past and after the general election in 2017 he called on the Labour leader to step down saying “leaders who lose a first election virtually never win a second”.

When asked about his thoughts on the current cabinet, Lord Adonis, said there was “quite a long list” of ministers that he believed were not doing their jobs well.

He argued that “about half” would not be in their position if Britain had not voted to leave the European Union and Ms May should consider sacking them.

“I don’t think there are many people who think that the Foreign Secretary [Boris Johnson] has done a brilliant job in representing the country abroad,” Lord Adonis told The Independent.

For more than a year now, I’ve been hearing from people in the inner circles of official Washington – GOP lobbyists, Republican pundits, even a few Republican members of Congress – that Donald Trump is remarkably stupid.

I figured they couldn’t be right because really stupid people don’t become presidents of the United States. Even George W. Bush was smart enough to hire smart people to run his campaign and then his White House.

Several months back when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “f—king moron,” I discounted it. I know firsthand how frustrating it can be to serve in a president’s cabinet, and I’ve heard members of other president’s cabinets describe their bosses in similar terms.

Now comes “Fire and Fury,” a book by journalist Michael Wolff, who interviewed more than 200 people who dealt with Trump as a candidate and president, including senior White House staff members.

In it, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster calls Trump a “dope.” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus both refer to him as an “idiot.” Rupert Murdoch says Trump is a “f—king idiot.”

Trump’s chief economic adviser Gary Cohn describes Trump as “dumb as sh-t,” explaining that “Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”

When one of Trump’s campaign aides tried to educate him about the Constitution, Trump couldn’t focus. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” the aide recalled, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”

Trump doesn’t think he’s stupid, of course. As he recounted, “I went to an Ivy League college … I did very well. I’m a very intelligent person.”

Yet Trump wasn’t exactly an academic star. One of his professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and Finance purportedly said that he was “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.”

Trump biographer Gwenda Blair wrote in 2001 that Trump was admitted to Wharton on a special favor from a “friendly” admissions officer who had known Trump’s older brother.

But hold on. It would be dangerous to underestimate this man.

Even if Trump doesn’t read, can’t follow a logical argument, and has the attention span of a fruit fly, it still doesn’t follow that he’s stupid.

There’s another form of intelligence, called “emotional intelligence.”

Emotional intelligence is a concept developed by two psychologists, John Mayer of the University of New Hampshire, and Yale’s Peter Salovey, and it was popularized by Dan Goleman in his 1996 book of the same name.

Mayer and Salovey define emotional intelligence as the ability to do two things – “understand and manage our own emotions,” and “recognize and influence the emotions of others.”

Granted, Trump hasn’t displayed much capacity for the first. He’s thin-skinned, narcissistic, and vindictive.

As dozens of Republican foreign policy experts put it, “he is unable or unwilling to separate truth from falsehood. He does not encourage conflicting views. He lacks self-control and acts impetuously. He cannot tolerate criticism.”

Okay, but what about Mayer and Salovey’s second aspect of emotional intelligence – influencing the emotions of others?

This is where Trump shines. He knows how to manipulate people. He has an uncanny ability to discover their emotional vulnerabilities – their fears, anxieties, prejudices, and darkest desires – and use them for his own purposes.

To put it another way, Trump is an extraordinarily talented conman.

He’s always been a conman. He conned hundreds of young people and their parents into paying to attend his near worthless Trump University. He conned banks into lending him more money even after he repeatedly failed to pay them. He conned contractors to work for them and then stiffed them.

Granted, during he hasn’t always been a great conman. Had he been, his cons would have paid off.

By his own account, in 1976, when Trump was starting his career, he was worth about $200 million, much of it from his father. Today he says he’s worth some $8 billion. If he’d just put the original $200 million into an index fund and reinvested the dividends, he’d be worth $12 billion today.

But he’s been a great political conman. He conned 62,979,879 Americans to vote for him in November 2016 by getting them to believe his lies about Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and all the “wonderful,” “beautiful” things he’d do for the people who’d support him.

And he’s still conning most of them.

Political conning is Trump’s genius. It’s this genius – when combined with his utter stupidity in every other dimension of his being – that poses the greatest danger to America and the world.

By Daniel Kim*

Trump has been called an “anti-immigrant” extremist, but I’m telling you, as a Korean aspiring to immigrate to the United States, that is simply not true. Trump wants to set a new way of immigration system by following both Canadian model and Australian model. Both Canada and Australia are far stricter than the United States when it comes to immigration. They do not have a lenient policy on illegal immigration. They do not try to attract people without a high English-speaking ability and high education level. And there’s no green card lottery in those countries. Rather, they give points to the immigrant applicants when they have accomplished each step of requirements such as official English exam scores (Either TOFEL or IELT), high educated diploma in the speaking-English countries, certified careers of occupations.

Trump and some of his allies in Congress are pushing to abolish the diversity lottery for green cards and increase security on the borders. He has put a halt to Obama’s DACA policy of giving temporary citizenship-level status to illegal immigrants who came to America as children. To be honest, many international students who come to America legally quite agree with suppressing the number of illegal immigrants because they might reduce the potential for legal immigration. At the least, it is extremely unfair to let illegal immigrants stay—or even become citizens, as some have proposed—while enforcing a harsh line on law-abiding students and foreign workers who have to jump through many hoops to try to get a job or student visa in the States.

Foreign students holding F1 visas (student visas) are not permitted to work on US soil. They cannot legitimately make money for feeding themselves and paying tuition on their own. Even public colleges like the University of California, University of Washington, and all the other state colleges require them to pay more US$40,000 dollars of annual tuition while illegal immigrants in many states are given in-state tuition, at rates many times lower. Our citizenship status is the same—and legitimate foreign students are actually abiding by the law—but foreign students have to pay more.

Yet it often seems like Democrats unceasingly focus on the plight of illegal immigrants to the detriment of legal immigrants. They wave the banner of “human rights” for illegal immigration, but where does it end? Should anybody have the right to cross a border as they wish and claim residence? What happens to Americans caught working illegally in a foreign land?

It is hard for foreign students to find a job in America even after graduating. Despite how much money we have invested in American education, we have not had any chance to earn fair opportunities. Furthermore, foreign graduates from American universities could help fill in knowledge gaps in the U.S. economy.

I have chosen to go to Washington & Jefferson College, even though I originally wanted to go to the Penn State University. I have been accepted to both schools, yet I had to pick the former due to the budget of my family. Washington and Jefferson College has offered me $27,000 of annual merit-based scholarship for two years. Its original annual tuition begins from $40,000 dollars, so I only have to pay $13,000 dollars per year, which is as same as the annual tuition for general Korean 4-year colleges. The public schools in the United States barely give scholarships to the international students because they earn a lot of money from foreign students paying full tuition. Pennsylvania currently doesn’t offer illegal immigrants in-state tuition, but its legislature in 2017 considered a bill to do just that, as it did in 2011.

Richard Nixon always despised JFK as Nixon could not afford going to Harvard, although he was accepted while JFK from his rich and influent family went there in spite of his low grades. I suppose that I can understand him very well about how he felt. The genuine American dream as far as I know is to earn based on one’s authentic efforts, and therefore, the current immigration system does not fit this fundamental virtue.

About the author:
*Daniel Kim has served as an artillery man and an interpreter in the Republic of Korea Army and is currently enrolled at Eastern Washington University where he is majoring in interdisciplinary studies.

Source:
This article was published by Bombs and Dollars

By Zaki Laidi*

The most recent World Trade Organization ministerial conference, held in December in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was a fiasco. Despite a limited agenda, the participants were unable to produce a joint statement. However, not everyone was disappointed by that outcome: China maintained a diplomatic silence, while the United States seemed to celebrate the meeting’s failure. This is bad news for Europe, which was virtually alone in expressing its discontent.

It is often pointed out that, in the face of US President Donald Trump’s protectionism, the European Union has an opportunity to assume a larger international leadership role, while strengthening its own position in global trade. The free-trade agreement recently signed with Japan will give the EU a clear advantage over the US in agriculture, and strengthening trade ties with Mexico could have a similar impact as the US renegotiates the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Some suggest that, to strengthen its position further, Europe should team up with China, which, despite its reticence at the WTO conference, has lately attempted to position itself as a champion of multilateralism. A Sino-European partnership could be a powerful force, offsetting America’s negative impact on international trade and cooperation.

Yet such a partnership is far from certain. Yes, Europe and China converge on a positive overall view of globalization and multilateralism. But, whereas Europe supports a kind of “offensive multilateralism” that seeks to beef up existing institutions’ rules and enforcement mechanisms, China resists changes to existing standards, especially if they strengthen enforcement of rules that might constrain its ability to maximize its own advantages.

Europe’s desire to force China to adhere to common rules aligns its interests more closely with the US, with which it shares many of the same grievances; from China’s continued subsidization of private enterprises to the persistence of barriers to market access. According to one recent study, market access barriers erected by China have taken a high toll on the growth of EU exports.

But the US and EU do not have the same vision for how to address these grievances. In order to limit abuse of WTO rules by China, Europe’s leaders want to be able to negotiate new, clearer rules, either through the framework of a bilateral investment agreement or through a plurilateral agreement on public procurement.

Trump does not want to reform the system; he wants to sink it. In fact, with Trump seeking to use bilateral deals to secure reductions in America’s trade deficit, the possibility that the US will leave the WTO altogether — a nightmare scenario for the EU, which advocates shared norms over force — cannot be excluded.

Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, had his own solution. New multilateral frameworks — the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with Asia and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the EU — would circumscribe China’s room for maneuver. As such frameworks brought about regulatory convergence, the US and the EU would be able to define the standards of the emerging new global economy, forcing China either to accept those standards or be left behind.

But this project has now been fatally undermined. Obama’s efforts to finalize both agreements before the end of his presidency, though understandable, bred serious concerns about hastiness. Europeans recognized that full regulatory convergence between the US and the EU would, in reality, take at least a decade. So, under pressure from their citizens, European leaders began to express concern about what the TTIP was lacking in terms of, say, environmental and sanitary regulations and transparency.

Given their shared interest in regulatory convergence, particularly to strengthen their position vis-a-vis China, the US and the EU will eventually have to resume cooperation toward that end. But, as long as Trump is in power, advocating bilateral reciprocity over multilateralism, such an effort will probably be impossible.

Instead, Trump’s America will most likely continue to take advantage of its far-reaching commercial influence to secure strategic or political gains. On this front, Europe is at a significant disadvantage. The EU is, after all, not a state, and it does not speak on international matters with one voice. It is not out of the question that the Chinese, who speak the language of realpolitik fluently, would prefer to meet the ad hoc demands of the Americans over the multilateral conditions of the Europeans.

In this context, the EU’s top priority should be to unify the positions of its member states, with the goal of overcoming the barriers erected by the US and creating shared systems for constraining China. But that is easier said than done. As it stands, many EU countries resist the introduction of any trade restrictions, whether owing to an excessive commitment to liberal economic ideals or fear of jeopardizing their own interests in China by, say, establishing an EU mechanism for managing foreign investment.

The emergence of “illiberal” governments in Central and Eastern Europe complicates matters further for the EU. These governments have no interest in any form of multilateralism, as they have embraced a narrow view of their interests. They often seem fascinated by the logic of realpolitik espoused by Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Moreover, these countries’ pursuit of their commercial interests could come at the expense of EU procurement rules. And they are not alone within the EU. Greece, for example, has accepted large amounts of Chinese investment. The EU then refused to mention China explicitly in a resolution on the conflict in the South China Sea.

European countries are not wrong to welcome Chinese investment, but China should be reciprocating, offering European investment a warmer welcome. That is why the EU and China should work to complete the bilateral investment treaty that they have been negotiating for years, with limited progress. Such a treaty should rely on reciprocal rules, including the dismantling of barriers to China’s market.

French President Emmanuel Macron is trying to advance offensive multilateralism. But, unless the EU as a whole embraces the cause, Europe — caught between China, which has a very conservative but outdated interpretation of multilateralism, and Trump, who wants to get rid of it — risks becoming a casualty.

• Zaki Laidi, Professor of International Relations at L’Institut d’etudes politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), was an adviser to former French prime minister Manuel Valls.

The former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is reported to have been arrested by authorities for allegedly inciting unrest against the regime, Al Arabiya reported, who were quoting earlier media reports with “reliable sources in Tehran.”

The Iranian regime has reportedly arrested Ahmadinejad in Shiraz city for inciting unrest during the recent protests in the country and encouraging more demonstrations following statements he made earlier in Bushehr.

Authorities are now seeking to place Ahmadinejad under house arrest with the approval of Ali Khamenei.

During a visit to Bushehr city late December, Ahmadinejad had claimed Iran suffered from “mismanagement” and that the current president, Hassan Rouhani and his government, believed he “owned the land and that the people are an ignorant society,” the newspaper went on to report.

“Some of the current leaders live detached from the problems and concerns of the people, and do not know anything about the reality of society,” they reported him saying.

By Gjergj Erebara

Two MPs have lost their right to sit in Albania’s parliament after prosecutors said they had failed to declare criminal offences they committed in Italy several years ago.

Aqif Rakipi, a powerful politician in the Elbasan region from the Justice, Unity and Integration Party, PDIU, in central Albania, lost his mandate as a member of Albania’s parliament on Friday, after prosecutors confirmed his role in a crime involving stolen goods in Italy in 1998.

A second MP, Gledjon Rehovica, from the opposition Socialist Movement of Integration, was also stripped of his seat because of his role in a case of shoplifting, also in Italy, back in 1999.

The Central Election Commission, CEC, had deliberated over the issue for days since last December, when prosecutors informed them of the results of their investigation.

Rakipi, also a businessman with activities in the mining sector, claimed he was innocent.

Rehovica, who had worked as a director in various state-owned enterprises before being elected to parliament in 2013, also claimed he was innocent. Both have the right to appeal the CEC decision before the Tirana Administrative Court.

Parliament’s composition remains unaffected, however. Under the Albanian electoral system, they will be substituted by other candidates from their own parties.

Albania approved a law to exclude criminal offenders from public offices in 2015 after the 2013 general election saw a number of people either convicted or suspected of crimes entering parliament.

Others with equally dubious pasts won mayoral races in 2015. Since then, some of these MPs have resigned, while others have been ousted.

Rakipi did not report any events requiring clarification in his past and the preliminary controls by prosecutors found him clean.

However, prosecutors then obtained his fingerprints from the biometric ID database and sent them for a second check to the Italian authorities, who answered that the fingerprints matched a criminal named Skender Ejylbegaj.

The same happened with the other MP who was found clean under his own name but was identified as a shoplifter under the name of Kusta Mina.

Albania’s so-called “decriminalisation law” bans from office only those convicted of serious crimes. However, MPs can also be disqualified if they fail to declare any offences.