During a two day police operation, six women religious who were captured in Nigeria’s Edo state two months ago were released unharmed on Saturday, generating much joy from the Christian community.

The women were freed during a Jan. 6 police operation, but their captors were able to escape.

They had been kidnapped Nov. 13, 2017 from the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus Convent in Iguoriakhi. Taken by unknown gunmen, three of the women were professed nuns (Sister Roseline Isiocha, Sister Aloysius Ajayi and Sister Frances Udi), and the other three were aspirants. Sister Ajayi was released first, followed several hours later by the others

“We are happy; to God be the glory,” said the convent’s mother superior, Mother Agatha Osarekho.

“They are fine and are receiving some medical checkup in a hospital,” she added, according to the Scottish Catholic Observer.

Sister Agatha received a ransom request of $55,000 for the women’s return, but she did not pay it.

Although the criminals were not captured, Sister Agatha applauded the efforts of authorities.

Fr. Kevin Oselumhense Anetor, a priest of the Diocese of Uromi, whence the women were kidnapped, posted on Facebook thanking “all the men and women of goodwill who worked and prayed tirelessly behind the scenes for the release of our sisters. We thank the mother superior of the EHJ for her patience and strong will, and her sisters for their solidarity during these days of trial.”

“We thank the Catholic Archdioceses of Benin and Lagos for their support and prayers, and indeed the Catholic and non-Catholic World, for their vigilance and prayers,” he added.

Archbishop Alfred Martins of Lagos had, earlier that week, urged government authorities to intensify their investigation into the abduction, saying, “We still do hope that the security agencies would do much more than is being done now to ensure that the sisters are released.”

Nigeria’s bishops had decried the nuns’ kidnapping in December, calling it a product of the “agents of darkness.”

Pope Francis also brought attention to the plight of the religious women, praying for them at his Dec. 17 Angelus address.

An Italian missionary priest, Fr. Maurizio Pallù, was kidnapped in Edo state for a week in October 2017. In Imo state, Fr. Cyriacus Onunkwo was kidnapped and killed in September of the same year.

Why do species die out? This is the overarching question being asked by many leading researchers. Knowing more about what leads to a species’ becoming extinct could enable us to do something about it. The passenger pigeon is a famous example and the species has been studied extensively.

The passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) was once found in huge numbers in North America. Records tell of passing flocks that darkened the skies for several days at a time. The species may have peaked at five billion individuals. A more conservative estimate is three billion.

Within a short time, the species disappeared completely.

“Given the huge size of the population, it’s simply amazing that the species disappeared so quickly,” says Tom Gilbert.

Gilbert is a professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for GeoGenetics, but he also has a part-time position as an adjunct professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

The human role

The history of the passenger pigeon is interesting, partly because it can tell us something about how and why species become extinct.

Native Americans also relied on passenger pigeons for food. But at least in parts of the passenger pigeons’ range, people had learned to harvest the species at a sustainable level that didn’t threaten to eradicate it.

It was common in some parts of North America to only eat young pigeons that were hunted at night, since this did not seem to scare away the adult birds or prevent them from re-nesting.

But starting around 1500, a more aggressive variant of humans came to the continent with the arrival of Europeans. The hunt for passenger pigeons grew and culminated in a massive hunt for the species throughout the 1800s, before the species finally collapsed and disappeared.

So were the Europeans then really the ones to blame for the collapse?

Already headed to oblivion?

In 2014, a study in published in the scientific journal PNAS strongly suggested that humans were simply the final straw in destroying a species that was already vulnerable and headed to oblivion.

The researchers asserted that despite their enormous numbers, the passenger pigeons were already in trouble. The population of the species varied greatly, similar to lemmings, but over a longer period of time.

When the Europeans arrived, the species was already in a strong decline. The population was plummeting long before Europeans arrived, and perhaps Europeans even contributed to a short-term increase in numbers.

Studies of the genetic variation of the species using an investigative method called PSMC formed the background for these assertions. And now we have to concentrate a bit.

From one to many

All of an individual’s genes are called a genome. You have a genome, your mom has her own genome, your dog has one and the neighbour’s cat has yet another. These can be broken down into chromosomes and genes and base pairs, but you only have a single genome.

So, all of your chromosomes and genes are found in this one genome, but at the same time this genome is unique to just you and only you. Unless, that is, you have an identical twin or are a termite or belong to another species where the individuals are largely identical clones. (In the last case, it’s remarkable that you can read this.)

Here is the crux of the matter

The PSMC method can use the information in the genes of a single individual of a species to map the history of the species.

You should therefore be able to see how the species developed over many generations, and estimate how many individuals there were at any given time, all based on a single genome.

Humans partially off the hook

Using this method, researchers found that the number of passenger pigeons was in free fall even before the arrival of the Europeans.

Although the species might not have become extinct, it would have shrunk significantly in any case, maybe to only a few hundred thousand individuals.

People were just the final factor in their demise. We may have pushed the passenger pigeons off the cliff, but the species was already on its way there.

So – according to the researchers behind the study in PNAS – it wasn’t just the Europeans’ fault.

It sounds almost too good to be true that you can come up with something so definitive based on information from just one or a few individuals. And in this case it is – at least if we’re to believe a new study that has recently been published in the journal Science.

Ineffective for passenger pigeons

The problem is that the PSMC method can’t be used on passenger pigeons. The new research in Science provides completely different results.

Leading molecular biologist Beth Shapiro is the main author of the Science article, and Tom Gilbert is one of the study’s contributors.

PSMC is based on the assumption that genetic variations occur relatively evenly all along the chromosomes that constitute the genome. That is, genetic changes are equally likely to occur at the ends of a chromosome as in the middle. But this turns out not to be the case for this species.

“Passenger pigeons don’t have the variation patterns that we’d expect, because of the strong selection on genes that appear to have been important throughout the species’ history. So it doesn’t work to use PSMC in this case,” said Gilbert.

In passenger pigeons, most of the genetic diversity was found at the ends of the chromosome. The middle of the chromosome showed little variation from one generation to the next as a result of the selection on these genes.

This fact may not sound revolutionary, but it yields completely different results if you try to read the history of the species based on the genome of a single individual.

You have to take into account that variations are greatest in certain parts of the chromosome rather than evenly distributed throughout. This makes the PSMC method unusable in this context.

Used another method

The researchers behind the article in Science didn’t use the PSMC method. Instead, they used mitochondrial DNA from 41 passenger pigeons as their starting point. Now we have to concentrate again.

Your DNA is not your only inheritance. Mitochondrial DNA is a distinct, separate inheritance found in certain cells called mitochondria.

Regular DNA is a combination of the inheritance from your father and mother. But mitochondrial DNA is only transmitted from your mother. Variations in mitochondrial DNA also occur due to mutations, and happen relatively consistently over time.

This is a different point of departure for understanding how a species develops over time, and the results can be quite different from those generated using the PSMC method.

In addition, the study presented in Science analysed the entire genomes from four passenger pigeons and compared them with two genomes from band-tailed pigeons (Patagioenas fasciata), one of the closest relatives of the passenger pigeon.

The final result was that the new study ended up with completely different answers about the passenger pigeons and why the species met its demise.

Genetic diversity

The new study is interesting for several reasons. It tells us about the genetic diversity of the passenger pigeon, but also supports an entirely different explanation for the species’ extinction.

Scientists previously believed that the larger the population of a species is, the more genetically diverse it will be. But this theory has turned out to be wrong, as the recent passenger pigeon research has shown.

According to the article in Science, the large population size appears to have enabled passenger pigeons to adapt and evolve more quickly and thus remove harmful mutations.

In species with fewer individuals, chance can cause a less beneficial mutation to persist, but chance plays less of a role in species with greater numbers of individuals.

“Mutations that provide a major evolutionary benefit would spread rapidly,” says Gilbert.

The fact that beneficial mutations became incredibly dominant so quickly simply led to the disappearance of other genetic variants.

This in turn led to the genetic diversity in the passenger pigeon being surprisingly low in relation to the number of individuals. This may have made the species more vulnerable to changes.

But that was not why the passenger pigeon died out.

Our mistake

“The passenger pigeon died out because of people,” is Gilbert’s short version.

The passenger pigeon wasn’t in trouble prior to Europeans arrival in North America. Nothing suggests that the species was struggling in any way.

Perhaps this isn’t that surprising. In the 19th century passenger pigeons were so numerous that there were contests to shoot as many of them as possible during a certain period of time. In one competition, the winner had shot 30 000 birds.

If nothing else, the story of the passenger pigeon has contributed to a greater understanding that even prolific species can become extinct.

Something to learn

The large grasshopper Melanoplus spretus from the western United States suffered the same fate. It went from a population of several trillion to zero in a few decades, possibly because farmers destroyed its breeding grounds. In Norway and across the whole of the North Atlantic, the great auk (Pinguinus impennis) died out after people harvested them in large numbers.

People ate passenger pigeons in huge amounts, but they were also killed because they were perceived as a threat to agriculture. As Europeans migrated across North America, they thinned out and eliminated the large forests that the pigeons depended on. The pigeons lived primarily on acorns.

As the species was already dying out, 250,000 birds – the last big flock – were shot on a single day in 1896. That same year, the last passenger pigeon was observed in Louisiana. It was also shot.

The pigeons were probably dependent on a large flock size to reproduce. Their instincts didn’t work when only a few individuals remained here and there.

The last passenger pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.

Wildlife species are being exposed to high levels of rat poison in northwest California, with illegal marijuana farms the most likely source point, according to a study led by the University of California, Davis, with the California Academy of Sciences.

The study, released Jan. 11 in the journal Avian Conservation and Ecology, showed that seven of the 10 Northern spotted owls collected tested positive for rat poison, while 40 percent of 84 barred owls collected also tested positive for the poison.

The study is the first published account of anticoagulant rodenticide in Northern spotted owls, which are listed as a threatened species under federal and state Endangered Species acts.

The study area encompasses Humboldt, Mendocino and Del Norte counties. It supports previous accounts that rat poison is contaminating the food web in this region, as the primary food source for owls-rodents–is being contaminated.

Driving the issue is the increasing conversion of private timberland into private, illegal and unpermitted marijuana cultivation sites. These sites often overlap with designated critical habitat for Northern spotted owls, and the owls feed at their edges.

“Spotted owls are inclined to feed along forest edges. Because grow sites break apart these forest landscapes, they are likely source points for exposure,” said lead author Mourad Gabriel, a research faculty member with the UC Davis Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center within the School of Veterinary Medicine’s One Health Institute. He’s also executive director of nonprofit Integral Ecology Research Center.

Gabriel’s studies in 2012, 2013 and 2015 were the first to link rat poison and illegal marijuana farms to the deaths of fishers, a weasel-like mammal living in remote forests of California and the Pacific Northwest, bringing broad attention to the issue.

Proposition 64, which legalizes recreational marijuana in the state, took effect this month. With its arrival, resource managers expect the number and size of unpermitted, private cultivation sites to grow, which could exacerbate the problem.

The study authors note that an estimated 4,500 – 15,000 private cultivation sites are in Humboldt County alone, yet the county has seen legal permits for only a small fraction of them. That means there are thousands of unpermitted private grow sites with no management oversight.

“When you have thousands of unpermitted grows and only a handful of biologists that regulate that for multiple counties, we’re deeply concerned that there aren’t sufficient conservation protective measures in place,” Gabriel said. “If no one is investigating the level at which private marijuana cultivators are placing chemicals out there, the fragmented forest landscapes created by these sites can serve as source points of exposure for owls and other wildlife.”

Anticoagulant rodenticides inhibit the ability of mammals and birds to recycle vitamin K. This creates a series of clotting and coagulation problems, which can lead to uncontrollable internal bleeding.

Barred owls are a physically larger group of owls currently competing for resources and space in critical habitat designated for Northern spotted owls. Forty percent, or 34 of the 84, of the barred owl tissue samples collected for this study tested positive for anticoagulant rodenticide. The owls are being exposed through the prey they eat.

Environmental contamination, when coupled with ongoing competition from barred owls, poses an additional stressor on Northern spotted owls, the study said. The fact that barred owls are contaminated as well shows that the species may be used as potential surrogates for detecting these contaminants in Northern spotted owls.

“Access to these owl specimens allows us to explore the health of the entire regional forest system,” says Jack Dumbacher, Curator of Ornithology and Mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences. “We’re using our collections to build a concrete scientific case for increased forest monitoring and species protection before it’s too late to intervene.”

This study’s researchers did not kill any owls for this study. Northern spotted owls were opportunistically collected when found dead in the field, while barred owl tissue samples were provided by outside investigators conducting an unrelated barred-owl project.

The necropsies for this study were conducted at the California Academy of Sciences and the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory System, which is part of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

By Nabila Ramdani*

Showbusiness for ugly people is how politics was once humorously described. That covers American president Donald Trump, but now that talk show queen Oprah Winfrey is emerging as his potential successor, the debasement of democracy appears to be almost complete. There was certainly a dramatic plunge when Winfrey used a stirring, Martin Luther King-style speech at the Golden Globes awards ceremony to stake her claim to becoming the next leader of the free world.

“A new day is on the horizon,” said Winfrey in relation to the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the determination of Hollywood to end sex crimes following accusations that the director routinely abused women.

Referring to the #MeToo campaign against alleged male attackers, Winfrey added: “When that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women and some pretty phenomenal men fighting hard to make sure they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say ‘me too’ again.”

There is, of course, very little that is ugly about Winfrey. She has largely devoted her career to the positive and optimistic side of life. The entirely self-made billionaire is said to have given away some $500 million to charity, while also supporting those with all sorts of problems, no matter what their racial, religious or cultural backgrounds.

Disturbingly, however, Winfrey was also a long-time friend and backer of Weinstein. She regularly posed for pictures kissing and cuddling him. The pair worked on numerous projects, including Winfrey making an appearance in The Butler, a movie released by the Weinstein studio as recently as 2013. Beyond the arts, they won awards for their collaborations on educational initiatives, and Winfrey was often Weinstein’s guest at social events.

Kadian Noble, one of the women who has filed a criminal complaint against Weinstein for sexual assault, said Winfrey was “swinging off his arm” when she first met him, and this greatly impressed the young actor. This notion of Winfrey having been a kind of enabler is, of course, firmly denied by the presenter, but she does admit offering Weinstein an interview to talk about his current legal problems.

It would be rash in the extreme to judge Winfrey’s suitability to stand for president in 2020 using an active criminal enquiry. All facts are in dispute, but there is no doubt that she has been close to a number of alpha males linked with sexual misconduct, not least former president Bill Clinton. Those endorsing Winfrey are the same type of liberals who ignore misdemeanors in Clinton’s busy sex life while in office, concentrating solely on Trump’s alleged abuse of women.

Critics accuse Trump of being a cynical populist who is primarily rooting for the very rich, along with racists including Nazi sympathisers and white supremacists. They also say he has no experience of government and instead displays a shallow, often fact-free knowledge of pretty much all important subjects. This, they insist, makes him singularly inept at representing America.

Sadly, all the evidence points to Winfrey also lacking expertise on global trade, world conflicts, tax reform, healthcare financing and many other crucial issues. She may be able to project her essential goodness using bland platitudes thanks to her incredible popularity but, as far as the often mindboggling technicalities of modern governance are concerned, she will be found woefully incompetent.

Rubbishing Winfrey as just another dim celeb would be unfair, but her qualifications to manage a superpower are negligible. Admirably, Winfrey admitted this herself seven years ago, telling an interviewer: “I’m not in any position or qualified to run a country, a city, a town hall meeting.”

Beyond the daytime TV chat and human-interest stories, Winfrey is best known for building a media empire that is based on making billions of dollars. If you believe in the American Dream, and the right of everybody to amass a fortune and shout about it, then this is fine, but surely there is far more to effective government than self-aggrandizement.

Pandering to those who want a Trump vs Winfrey contest would drag US politics to a new low. It would show that the political class is so mediocre that the two governing parties – the Republicans for Trump and the Democrats for Winfrey – now rely on showbiz candidates without forensic minds or a track record in public service that might deem them capable of acting on complex matters such as the global financial system or the dangers of nuclear proliferation.

All that the championing of Winfrey tells us is that celebrity culture is now out of control. It is swamping almost every aspect of public life, and creating a world where the trivial and banal takes precedence.

The absurdity of the current situation was best summed up by Trump himself in 1999. Asked by CNN about the choice of a vice presidential candidate in a potential future race for the top job, Trump immediately replied: “Oprah.” He repeated such a sentiment as recently as 2015. When even Trump wants Winfrey to be elevated to high office by his side, it is perhaps safest to conclude that the whole idea is very ugly indeed.

*Nabila Ramdani is an award-winning French-Algerian journalist, columnist and broadcaster who specializes in French politics, Islamic affairs and the Arab world.

A method of securely communicating between multiple quantum devices has been developed by a UCL-led team of scientists, bringing forward the reality of a large-scale, un- hackable quantum network.

To date, communicating via quantum networks has only been possible between two devices of known provenance that have been built securely.

With the EU and UK committing €1 billion and £270 million* respectively into funding quantum technology research, a race is on to develop the first truly secure, large-scale network between cities that works for any quantum device.

“We’re in a technology arms race of sorts. When quantum computers are fully developed, they will break much of today’s encryption whose security is only based on mathematical assumptions. To pre-emptively solve this, we are working on new ways of communicating through large networks that don’t rely on assumptions, but instead use the quantum laws of physics to ensure security, which would need to be broken to hack the encryption,” explained lead author, Dr Ciarán Lee (UCL Physics & Astronomy).

Published in Physical Review Letters and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the study by UCL, the University of Oxford and the University of Edinburgh scientists details a new way of communicating securely between three or more quantum devices, irrespective of who built them.

“Our approach works for a general network where you don’t need to trust the manufacturer of the device or network for secrecy to be guaranteed. Our method works by using the network’s structure to limit what an eavesdropper can learn,” said Dr Matty Hoban (University of Oxford, previously University of Edinburgh).

The approach bridges the gap between the theoretical promise of perfect security guaranteed by the laws of quantum physics and the practical implementation of such security in large networks.

It tests the security of the quantum devices prior to engaging in communications with the whole network. It does this by checking if the correlations between devices in the network are intrinsically quantum and cannot have been created by another means.

These correlations are used to establish secret keys which can be used to encrypt any desired communication. Security is ensured by the unique property that quantum correlations can only be shared between the devices that created them, ensuring no hacker can ever come to learn the key.

The team used two methods – machine learning and causal inference – to develop the test for the un-hackable communications system. This approach distributes secret keys in a way that cannot be effectively intercepted, because through quantum mechanics their secrecy can be tested and guaranteed.

“Our work can be thought of as creating the software that will run on hardware currently being built to realise the potential of quantum communications. In future work, we’d like to work with partners in the UK national quantum technologies programme to develop this further. We hope to trial our quantum network approach over the next few years,” concluded Dr Lee.

The team acknowledge that an un-hackable network could be abused in the same way that current networks are, but highlight that there is also a clear benefit to ensuring privacy too.

Iran’s Navy dispatched a team of experts and commandos to China on Wednesday night for a heliborne operation at the site of a ship crash in the East China Sea that caused a roaring fire at an Iranian oil tanker, which has been burning since January 6.

According to Navy officer Captain Mohsen Bahrami, the team, including Navy experts and up to 12 commandos, was dispatched to the crash site for heliborne operation to save possible survivors of the tragic incident.

China will provide the Iranian military group with the necessary equipment, he added.

A lawmaker told Tasnim on Wednesday that the dispatch of the military team follows arrangements between the navies of the two countries.

Iranian oil tanker ‘Sanchi’ which collided with a Chinese freight ship in the East China Sea on Saturday is still on fire after several days.

Rescuers from China, South Korea, and Japan have been struggling to control the blaze and find survivors, if any.

The Panama-registered tanker was carrying 136,000 tons of condensate, an ultra-light crude that is highly flammable and to South Korea, equivalent to about 1 million barrels and worth about $60 million.

Bad weather at the sea has made the rescue and cleanup efforts difficult.

On Wednesday, Reuters quoted South Korea’s Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries as saying that the stricken oil tanker could burn for as long as one month

Asthma costs the U.S. economy more than $80 billion annually in medical expenses, missed work and school days and deaths, according to new research published online in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society.

In “The Economic Burden of Asthma in the United States, 2008-2013,” researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, the most comprehensive source of data on health care use, expenditures, payment source and health insurance coverage in the U.S.

“The cost of asthma is one of the most important measures of the burden of the disease,” said Tursynbek Nurmagambetov, PhD, lead study author and health economist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Cost studies can influence health policy decisions and help decision makers understand the scale, seriousness and implications of asthma, so that resources can be identified to improve disease management and reduce the burden of asthma.”

Of 213,994 respondents to the survey over a six-year period, the study identified 10,237 people with treated asthma. The researchers defined treated asthma as having at least one medical encounter for asthma or having a prescription for at least one asthma medicine filled during a calendar year. Based on the pooled sample, researchers estimated average annual numbers and costs for the U.S. population.

Based on the 2008-2013 pooled sample, the study estimated (all costs are expressed in 2015 U.S. dollars):

• About 15.4 million people in the U.S. had treated asthma each year.
• The total annual cost of asthma in the U.S., including medical care, absenteeism and mortality, was $81.9 billion.
• The annual per-person medical cost of asthma was $3,266. Of that, $1,830 was for prescriptions, $640 for office visits, $529 for hospitalizations, $176 for hospital outpatient visits and $105 for emergency room care.
• Asthma-related mortality cost $29 billion per year, representing on average 3,168 deaths.
• Missed work and school days combined cost $3 billion per year, representing 8.7 million workdays and 5.2 million school days lost due to asthma.
• People with no health insurance had significantly lower per person total medical expenditure for asthma compared to insured people.

According to the authors, the study likely underestimated the total cost of asthma to the U.S. economy because their analysis did not include people whose asthma went untreated. The study also did not include nonmedical costs associated with asthma, including transportation expenses, time lost waiting for appointments and diminished productivity while functioning at work or school with asthma.

“The findings of the paper highlight the critical need to support and further strengthen asthma control strategies,” Dr. Nurmagambetov said. “CDC’s National Asthma Control Program was founded in 1999 to help reduce the burden of asthma in the United States. In order to reduce asthma-related ER visits, hospitalizations, absenteeism and mortality, we need to support guidelines-based care, expand self-management education and reduce environmental asthma triggers at homes.”

A new study suggests an association between elevated amyloid beta levels and the worsening of anxiety symptoms. The findings support the hypothesis that neuropsychiatric symptoms could represent the early manifestation of Alzheimer’s disease in older adults.

Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative condition that causes the decline of cognitive function and the inability to carry out daily life activities. Past studies have suggested depression and other neuropsychiatric symptoms may be predictors of AD’s progression during its “preclinical” phase, during which time brain deposits of fibrillar amyloid and pathological tau accumulate in a patient’s brain. This phase can occur more than a decade before a patient’s onset of mild cognitive impairment. Investigators at Brigham and Women’s Hospital examined the association of brain amyloid beta and longitudinal measures of depression and depressive symptoms in cognitively normal, older adults.

Their findings, published by The American Journal of Psychiatry, suggest that higher levels of amyloid beta may be associated with increasing symptoms of anxiety in these individuals. These results support the theory that neuropsychiatric symptoms could be an early indicator of AD.

“Rather than just looking at depression as a total score, we looked at specific symptoms such as anxiety. When compared to other symptoms of depression such as sadness or loss of interest, anxiety symptoms increased over time in those with higher amyloid beta levels in the brain,” said first author Nancy Donovan, MD, a geriatric psychiatrist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

“This suggests that anxiety symptoms could be a manifestation of Alzheimer’s disease prior to the onset of cognitive impairment. If further research substantiates anxiety as an early indicator, it would be important for not only identifying people early on with the disease, but also, treating it and potentially slowing or preventing the disease process early on.”

As anxiety is common in older people, rising anxiety symptoms may prove to be most useful as a risk marker in older adults with other genetic, biological or clinical indicators of high AD risk.

Researchers derived data from the Harvard Aging Brain Study, an observational study of older adult volunteers aimed at defining neurobiological and clinical changes in early Alzheimer’s disease. The participants included 270 community dwelling, cognitively normal men and women, between 62 and 90 years old, with no active psychiatric disorders. Individuals also underwent baseline imaging scans commonly used in studies of Alzheimer’s disease, and annual assessments with the 30-item Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS), an assessment used to detect depression in older adults.

The team calculated total GDS scores as well as scores for three clusters symptoms of depression: apathy-anhedonia, dysphoria, and anxiety. These scores were looked at over a span of five years.

From their research, the team found that higher brain amyloid beta burden was associated with increasing anxiety symptoms over time in cognitively normal older adults. The results suggest that worsening anxious-depressive symptoms may be an early predictor of elevated amyloid beta levels – and, in turn AD — and provide support for the hypothesis that emerging neuropsychiatric symptoms represent an early manifestation of preclinical Alzheimer’s disease.

Donovan noted further longitudinal follow-up is needed to determine whether these escalating depressive symptoms give rise to clinical depression and dementia stages of Alzheimer’s disease over time.

Geo-engineering, which involves artificial intervention in the global climate, is attracting growing attention. What is geo-engineering and what are its security implications? What kind of governance is required to manage its adverse effects?

By ANM Muniruzzaman*

Geo-engineering is emerging as an option to address the adverse impacts of climate change. It involves largescale artificial intervention in the climate. Two main methods of geo-engineering are Solar Radiation Management (SRM) and Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR).

Concerns revolve around the adverse effects of geo-engineering as it intervenes in the regular system and natural order of the world’s climate. A special kind of governance is required at the global level to develop and monitor geo-engineering.

What is Geo-engineering?

Geo-engineering denotes large-scale direct human intervention in the Earth’s natural system to counter the adverse impacts of climate change. Geo-engineering is often considered as the last option to save the Earth from the worst effects of climate change.

One way being explored in geo-engineering is to divert some sunlight from reaching the Earth’s surface and thus reduce the average temperature of the Earth. Another way deals with the extraction of carbon dioxide directly from the Earth’s atmosphere thus reducing the global temperature.

Solar Radiation Management (SRM) implies developing artificial barriers so that solar radiation can only reach the Earth’s surface at a controlled level. It incorporates a number of mechanisms. One tool is to float small mirrors in space so that they may reflect sun rays away from the Earth. Another possible tool is throwing sulphate aerosols in the stratosphere with the purpose of enhancing the reflectivity of light.

In 1991, the eruption from Mount Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines ejected more than 20 million tonnes of sulfur dioxide and subsequently produced sulphate aerosol spreading particles in the stratosphere. These particles scattered and obstructed light from reaching the surface of the Earth. In the following two years, global temperatures declined by 0.6 degrees C.

Whereas SRM does not take into account the issue of carbon dioxide and its other impacts, another approach known as Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) directly deals with the elimination of carbon dioxide from the Earth’s environment. One tool within CDR is setting sophisticated machines to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. Another tool is known as ‘Ocean Fertilisation’ that implies mixing nutrients such as iron with ocean water to increase the rate of photosynthesis.

The higher rate of photosynthesis requires more atmospheric carbon dioxide which is absorbed in the process. Thus, atmospheric carbon dioxide declines. Another way is to bury underground large amounts of charcoal that is actually carbon so that they cannot enter the carbon cycle.

Geo-engineering Efforts

Large-scale interventions on climate change are still at the level of research. However, some field-level experiments have taken place recently. An American businessman dumped around 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean near Canada. Satellite image has shown that the chemicals produced large amounts of plankton spreading for 10,000 square kilometres.

The planktons, after absorbing the carbon dioxide, sank and inundated the sea-bed. The experiment adversely affected the surrounding ecosystems, producing toxic tides and increasing ocean acidification — triggering criticism from environment groups.

Security Implications of Geo-engineering

The most serious concern is that the consequences of geo-engineering are unknown and uncertain. Neither have we game-planned nor have done any modelling on potential adverse consequences of its deployment on an already fragile climate. It is quite likely that the impacts will go beyond our control, possibly leading to dire consequences on the global climate and on a global scale.

Also there is a high possibility that in the guise of addressing the global climate, geo-engineering technology will be weaponised. Advanced countries can exploit geo-engineering for their military and political objectives over other countries. While executing geo-engineering a comprehensive approach is required. A piecemeal application will rather generate new adverse consequences.

The deployment mechanism of geo-engineering is too sophisticated for civilian institutions to effectively handle it. Hence there will be the need for the involvement of the military, usually the most organised and best equipped of national institutions. Thus, geo-engineering might trigger a race for military expansion and be exploited for military purposes.

Large military establishments in the duty of implementing geo-engineering may be targets of militant or military attacks. Competition among countries over geo-engineering will likely militarise outer space. Mistrust and suspicion among governments will rise as countries can deploy geo-engineering for narrow benefits to the detriment of other nations. Therefore, the suspicion and blame-game can give rise to ‘weather war’.

It is important to note that once started, there is no going back on geo-engineering; it must be continued for an extended period of time, perhaps even indefinitely. If the process is stopped abruptly, we may experience termination shock that will negate whatever successes of geo-engineering achieved and the global temperature will rise again dramatically. While dealing with climate change, mitigation strategies should be the main priority. Geo-engineering should be considered only as a last resort.

Governance Structure Needed

Right now obscurity clouds the emerging field of geo-engineering. There is no accepted oversight body to monitor the issue. Much opacity prevails regarding research and experimentations. It is arduous to keep updated on research and experiments on geo-engineering that are going on worldwide. It is high time that the governance structure be fixed to avoid unmanageable circumstances in the future.

Wider debate on every aspect of geo-engineering technology at the international level is needed, as are rules and regulations to govern this application. An international body to oversee and regulate the mechanism is a must, perhaps under the aegis of the United Nations.

There should also be a verification regime to accurately monitor the impacts post-deployment. There is a high possibility that things may not go on as planned. So contingency planning should be done beforehand at the global level.

In the final analysis, there should be a global moratorium on large-scale geo-engineering intervention in the world’s climate until everything is in place: rules and regulations to be formulated must be accepted at the global level while sufficient research and pilot experiments must be carried out. A global research pool has also to be formed. Recent findings regarding geo-engineering must be transparent and open to access by all.

*Major General ANM Muniruzzaman (Retd) was recently a Visiting Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is President and CEO of the Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies (BIPSS) and Chairman of the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change (GMACCC).

The Swiss government has ordered an end to the common culinary practice of throwing lobsters into boiling water while they are still alive, ruling that they must be knocked out before they are killed, The Guardian reports.

As part of a wider overhaul of Swiss animal protection laws, Bern said that as of 1 March, “the practice of plunging live lobsters into boiling water, which is common in restaurants, is no longer permitted”.

According to Swiss public broadcaster RTS, only electric shock or the “mechanical destruction” of the lobster’s brain will be accepted methods of stunning the animals once the new rule takes affect.

Animal rights advocates and some scientists argue that lobsters and other crustaceans have sophisticated nervous systems and likely feel significant pain when boiled alive.

The Swiss government also said it would no longer be permitted to transport live marine crustaceans like lobsters on ice or in icy water, ruling instead that they should “always be held in their natural environment”.

The government order also aims to crack down on illegal puppy farms and imports, and ban devices that automatically punish dogs when they bark.

Organisers of public events featuring animals will also be directly responsible for their welfare when the new rules take effect, the government order said.

On Wednesday a former distinguished US State Department official who has now switched jobs to work for the UN, Jeffery Feltman, as Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, arrived in Tripoli. His visit came as the UN’s efforts to implement the Libyan Political Agreement (LPA) continue to face political deadlock with justifiable fears from the UN that their efforts look lightly to fall apart.

Given the decades Feltman spent as part of the US State Department, he will no doubt be perceived by the Libyans to be speaking for America as well as the UN.

It first must be said that Libya is a prime example of the failure of US and Western interventionist foreign policy. The US, EU, and UN would be doing everyone a favor if it kept its noses out of Libyan business.

The French Foreign Minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, visited Libya just before Christmas in a continuing but futile attempt to impose a forced marriage between UN selected and backed Fayez Serraj and the head of the Libyan National Army (LNA), Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar. It has been an absolute impossibility thus far.

The current situation in Libya shows that the Libyan Political Agreement (LPA) processes that the UN, fronted most recently by France, tried to implement since its signing two years ago cannot be accepted. Now here comes Feltman to repeat Le Drians pitch!

The fact is the LNA and Haftar control almost all the oil in Libya and the majority of the country’s territory. Whereas Serraj is unable to move beyond the small naval base situated by the sea in Tripoli, heavily protected by paid militias.

Following Le Drian’s meeting in Tripoli with Serraj just before Christmas, Le Drian flew to Benghazi for a meeting with Haftar.

Le Drian, the UN, or Western powers still fail to understand that the LPA is rejected by all including the Libyan people. The east Libyans still believe international support is given to the Muslim Brotherhood Party and its members, something Haftar vehemently opposes and always will.

To be even clearer: Haftar announced in late December that the Libyan Political Agreement (LPA) “expired” two years after the Libyan political parties signed it. “As of Dec. 17, 2017, the so-called political agreement expired. Therefore, all bodies resulting from this agreement automatically lost their legitimacy, which is questioned since day one,” Haftar stated this in a televised speech to the Nation.

Why the UN persists with this fantasy of the LPA is beyond logic.

Haftar has positioned himself as the best man for the job, the one to bring stability to Libya with support of Libyans rather than foreigners. However he has drawn some support from Russia, which was requested on January 6th by the speaker of the Tobruk-based parliament to help with mediation. “We see that Russia’s role assists in the reconciliation between the Libyans,” Aguila Saleh Issa said.

The key, unresolved issue remains who can secure Libya internally and stop millions of migrants, mostly economic ones, from over-running Europe. Is it to be Haftar or the UN selected Serraj?

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.

By Lisa Ferdinando

The vast, global networks of the Defense Department are under constant attack, with the sophistication of the cyber assaults increasing, the director of Defense Information Systems Agency said.

Army Lt. Gen. Alan R. Lynn, who is also the commander of the Joint Force Headquarters, Department of Defense Information Networks, described some of the surprises of being in his post, which he has held since 2015.

Lynn spoke at a luncheon of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association’s Washington Chapter.

“We do an excellent job of defending the [Department of Defense Information Networks], but the level of attacks that we’ve seen actually was really truly surprising and it still continues to surprise me just how robust the attacks have become,” he said.

‘Terabyte of Death’ Attack: A Matter of When, Not If

A few years ago, getting a 1-gigabyte or 2-gigabyte attack at the internet access point was a big deal, he said. “Now, we get 600-gig attacks on the internet access points and unique, different ways of attacking that we hadn’t thought of before,” he added.

The Defense Department is fortified against even larger attacks, he said.

“There’s now, we would call it the ‘terabyte of death’ – there is a terabyte of death that is looming outside the door,” he said. “We’re prepared for it, so we know it’s coming.”

He noted, “It’s just a matter of time before it hits us.”

Scale of DoD Networks ‘Massive’

Lynn, who retires next month, said the size of the DoD network is something else that surprised him. He described it as a “massive,” 3.2 million-person network that he has to defend or help support in some way.

“There’s something happening every second of every minute globally that you can’t take your eye off of,” he said.

The department needs agile systems for the warfighter to stay ahead of an adversary that is evolving and moving, he pointed out.

There are challenges to finding solutions that scale to the DoD Information Networks, he said. A commercial solution that works for a smaller operation might not translate into something that is effective for the worldwide DoD networks, he explained.

DISA, he pointed out, is a combat support agency responsible for a multitude of networks. He cited as examples the networks between the drones and the drone pilots, or the F-35 “flying mega-computer” that needs a lot of data and intelligence, or the “big pipes” that connect various entities to missile defense.

He explained how commercial mobile platforms have been modified for warfighters to accommodate secret or top secret communications.

“Anywhere they are globally, if they’ve got to make a serious decision right now and it means seconds, that’s there and available to them,” he said, adding that mobile platforms are becoming “more and more capable as we go.”

Warfighting, which now includes streaming drone video feeds, is happening on mobile devices, he said. “It’s pretty cool to watch,” he remarked.

While acknowledging DISA does do “a lot of cool IT stuff,” Lynn said all of the efforts support a singular focus. “At the end of the day, it’s about lethality,” he said.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman will be putting his best foot forward when enthusiastic women soccer fans this week attend for the first time a men’s soccer match in the kingdom.

The event symbolizes the social and economic changes Prince Mohammed is introducing in his effort to turn Saudi Arabia into a 21^st century autocracy with an economy that produces badly needed jobs in and can compete in a post-oil world.

The match between Al Hilal and Al Ittihad in Riyadh’s King Fahd stadium is “a historic game, the first in which Saudi families can enter a stadium together… They are finally going to have activities and entertainment together where they’re not separated, where parents go with their kids and mothers and even grandmothers, where they can enjoy sports events specifically, together… I really think it reinforces family values,” said Lina Al-Maeena, a member of the kingdom’s Shura or Advisory Council, and director of Jeddah United, Saudi Arabia’s first women’s basketball team.

The event is certain to overshadow Prince Mohammed’s efforts to incorporate sports in his bid to concentrate power in his own hands and crack down on anyone who stands in his way.

Al Hilal signed a sponsorship deal with Kingdom Holding weeks before its majority shareholder and chairman, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, was detained in November in Prince Mohammed’s massive purge of princes, senior officials, and prominent businessmen on alleged corruption charges.

An internationally acclaimed billionaire businessman with holdings in Western blue chips, Prince Alwaleed has emerged as the symbol of those who have so far refused to cut a monetary deal with the government and were recently moved from Riyadh’s posh Ritz Carlton Hotel to a high security prison in Riyadh.

In the latest incident, Prince Abdullah bin Saud bin Mohammed, the head of kingdom’s Maritime Sports Federation, was sacked and replaced by a military officer. Prince Abdullah was the latest Saudi sports executive to be fired in an apparent violation of international sports governance that bans governments from interfering in the affairs of federations and clubs.

Prince Abdullah was reportedly relieved of his position after circulation of a six-minute audio tape on WhatsApp that challenged the government’s justification of last week’s arrest of 11 members of the ruling family, months after the initial purge.

In a country in which differences within the ruling family are seldom aired in public, Saudi Arabia’s attorney general, Saud al-Mojeb, said the 11 had been arrested for staging a sit-in outside a palace and protesting a royal order to halt utility payments for family members. He said the princes were also seeking compensation for the 2016 execution of one of their cousins, Prince Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, who was convicted of murder.

In his audio tape, Prince Abdullah denounced Mr. Al-Mojeb’s assertion as “completely false” and “not believable.” He wondered how the princes could have had issues with utility bills, given that they “have great financial capabilities, far from concerns and financial problems, and were raised by their fathers to be obedient” to the king.

Prince Abdullah went on to praise King Salman and Prince Mohammed’s leadership and criticized “the attempts of some to create division and schism within the royal family.”

Prince Abdullah’s dismissal came a month after Turki Bin Abdul Mohsen Al-Asheikh, appointed by Prince Mohammed chairman of the General Sport Authority and effectively Saudi Arabia’s minister of sport, removed Prince Faisal bin Turki bin Nasser as head of Riyadh-based Al Nasser FC, one of the kingdom’s most popular soccer clubs. Prince Faisal was replaced by Salman al-Malik, a member of the board of the Saudi Arabian Football Association.

Prince Faisal is a son of Prince Turki bin Nasser, the honorary chairman of Al Nasser until 2016 and a former high-ranking military officer and fighter pilot who headed the Presidency of Meteorology and Environment.

Prince Turki was among the members of the ruling family caught up in Prince Mohammed’s purge. He was central to a controversial $56 billion arms deal with Britain that sparked a corruption investigation in 2004. The investigation was shut down in 2006 by then prime minister Tony Blair in 2006 under pressure from the Saudis.

Prince Mohammed has identified privatization of sports clubs, many of which are aligned with different members of the ruling families, as a key element in Vision 2030, his reform plan that includes development of sports as both a recreational and public health priority.

The limits of Prince Mohammed’s social liberalization were evident with an unidentified Saudi soccer player for Al-Nojoom FC facing legal charges for refusing a high five during a match and opting instead for dabbing, a dance craze, which involves a person tucking their head into the crook of their arm

Abdallah Al Shahani, a popular singer, actor, and TV host was arrested in August after a video clip of his dab went viral. The Saudi Interior Ministry’s National Commission for Combating Drugs recently banned the dance because it allegedly referred to the use of marijuana.

The attendance of woman at a male sporting event constitutes no doubt a milestone that followed on the heels of the lifting of a ban on women’s driving. It is however, but the beginning in a country in which women remain subject to the will of their male guardians and whose reform process has yet to demonstrate that it involves adherence to the rule of law, checks and balances, and greater freedoms that are not curtailed by arbitrary and repressive policies.

A question naturally arises in the minds of curious students of regional geopolitics that why did Pakistan choose to wage Washington’s proxy war against the erstwhile Soviet Union in Afghanistan back in the 1980s? Was it to strengthen its defences against India, the oft-quoted ‘strategic depth’ theory, or the fear that the former Soviet Union might make further advances into Pakistan’s Balochistan province to reach the warm waters of the Arabian Sea?

All these geopolitical considerations might have played a part, but to understand the real reason why Pakistan decided to become Washington’s accomplice in the Afghan conflict, we need to understand the nature of power. Rationally speaking, power ought to be means to achieve higher goals, but in practical life, we often face David Hume’s ‘is-ought dilemma,’ where rather than means to an end, power becomes an end in itself, and it is the nature of power to expand further and to grow more powerful.

Thus, Pakistan’s security establishment did not collaborate in Washington’s ‘bear trap project’ for any ulterior strategic goals, the goal was simply to exercise power by taking advantage of the opportunity. In order to elaborate this abstract concept, I would like to draw a parallel between power and sex. In the grand scheme of things, sex is not an end in itself; it is means to an end, the end being the procreation of offspring.

But many hedonic couples nowadays use contraceptives and don’t consider it worthwhile to procreate and nurture children, due to economic constraints or the unnecessary effort that nurturing children inevitably entails. Social scientists have no business offering advice or moral lessons; to each his own. But if the ultimate end for which nature has invented the agency comes to a naught, that does not per se renders the agency any less significant, instead the agency itself becomes an end in itself. Thus, power is like sex; its exercise is pleasurable and its goal is further expansion and amassing of more power to satisfy the insatiable needs of compulsive power maniacs.

Notwithstanding, many Leftist activists nowadays commit the fallacy of trying to establish an essentialist and linear narrative to global events. One cannot question their bona fide intentions, but their overzealous efforts sometimes prove counterproductive to their own credibility and the causes that they are striving for.

All the contemporary conflicts are not energy wars. The Iraq and Libya wars were obviously energy wars, because Iraq has proven petroleum reserves of 140 billion barrels and it can produce 5 million barrels of crude oil per day, which is second only to Saudi Arabia’s 10 million barrels daily oil production and 266 billion barrels of proven petroleum reserves, while Libya used to produce 1.6 million barrels per day before the civil war in 2011 and has the proven reserves of 48 billion barrels.

The Syrian conflict has a different dimension to it. Syria does not produce much oil except approximately 385,000 barrels per day from the north-east in Deir al-Zor and has proven petroleum reserves of only 2.5 billion barrels. NATO’s involvement in the Syrian conflict is for the sake of ensuring Israel’s regional security. The single biggest threat to Israel’s regional security was posed by the Shi’a resistance axis comprising Iran, the Assad regime in Syria and their Lebanon-based proxy, Hezbollah.

During the course of 2006 Lebanon war, Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets into northern Israel, and Israel’s defence community realised for the first time the nature of threat that Hezbollah and its patrons, Iran and the Assad regime in Syria, posed to Israel’s regional security. Those were only unguided rockets but it was a wakeup call for Israel’s military strategists that what will happen if Iran passed the guided missile technology to Hezbollah whose area of operations lies very close to the northern borders of Israel.

Washington’s military intervention in Afghanistan in October 2001 in the backdrop of the 9/11 terror attack, however, was different from all other wars. It was a war of imperial hubris and a war of liability rather than a war of choice. That’s why we didn’t see much commitment of troops and resources by the Bush administration in the initial years of the Afghan war, and only an year into the Afghan war, Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003 for its 140 billion barrels of petroleum reserves.

It was the Obama administration 2009-onward that made the Afghan war a bedrock of its foreign policy. By going dovish on Iraq, Obama wanted to offset his public perception of being a weak president by offering an alternative of a ‘just war,’ the Afghan war. And consequently, the number of US troops in Afghanistan spiked from 30,000 during the tenure of the neocon Bush administration to more than 100,000 during the term of the supposedly ‘pacifist’ Obama administration.

It bears mentioning that during the election campaign of 2008 before he was elected president, Barack Obama made an artificial distinction between the supposedly ‘just war’ in Afghanistan and the unjust war in Iraq. In accordance with the flawed distinction, he pledged that he would withdraw American troops from Iraq but not from Afghanistan.

The unilateral intervention in Iraq by the Bush administration was highly unpopular among the American electorate. Therefore, Obama’s election pledge of complete withdrawal of the US troops from Iraq struck a chord with the voters and they gave an overwhelming mandate to the ostensibly ‘pacifist’ contender during his first term as the president.

In keeping with the election pledge, President Obama did manage to successfully withdraw American troops from Iraq in December 2011 during the first term as the president, but only to commit thousands of American troops and the US Air Force to Iraq just a couple of years later during the second term as the president when the Islamic State overran Mosul and Anbar in early 2014.

The borders between Iraq and Syria are poorly guarded and highly porous. The Obama administration’s policy of nurturing militants against the Assad regime in Syria for the first three years of the Syrian civil war from 2011 to 2014 was bound to backfire sooner or later.

One wonders how the public got so thrilled by a book that combines all the D. C. gossip and tittle-tattle between two boards, which the tabloids published about Trump’s chaotic White House so far. The book was a media coup that only served the financial advantage of the author; it made him even more precious. The following statement says a lot about Michael Wolff’s motives: “Seth Rich is dead and I am rich: man, what a great world! People want my book, not the truth about Rich.” Rich’s assassination is still in the dark, and it will never be solved. Cooperating with Wolff who as a journalist raises only eyebrows, sends a message to the readers that his sources are gossipers, and lots of stuff is just fantasy. The only substance came from Steve Bannon.

What Bannon tells about Trump’s family (daughter Ivanka, son Don Jr., or Jarad Kushner) shows his political unprofessionalism, which was just “sloppy.” Because Bannon lost the fight between “Jews and Non-Jews” in the White House, he branded the meeting with the Russian lawyer at Trump Tower as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.” Perhaps it was just politically naive.

When there has ever been “Russian collusion” then it was for the sake of Israel. General Flynn had to meet with the Russian ambassador to convince him to prevent the UN Security Council Resolution from passing. Because Israel was the leading cause, the mainstream media put this fact under the rug. The chapter on Russia is just about the Flynn affaire. No evidence for any collusion.

With the election of Donald Trump, the media pundits promised the American people another Hitler. Instead, they got another white Obama who was himself another more intelligently acting G.W. Bush. Hillary Clinton and her mafia-like DNC would have been only slightly different. The media crowd would have applauded her “intelligent” policy approach, whereas Trump, who does the same as Obama did, was demonized as another Hitler, Russian agent, lunatic, “moron,” you name it. But the “Deep State,” which consist of Democrats and their supporters, has Trump already in its clutches.

Such “looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book,” writes Wolff. Perhaps this description holds also true for the story and the author himself. That such a scribbler has “a semi-permanent seat on a coach in the West Wing” or could play a fly on the wall over month puts the reputation of Wolff, the chaos and naiveté of the Trump White House on an equal footing.

What value does a book have whose author – a neoliberal journalist, who proudly proclaims that he aims to bring down Donald Trump? It seems that’s the continuation of the Russia gate spin. Wolff’s pseudo-journalist scribbling will be yesterday’s news in a few weeks. It’s all Washingtonian gossip and part of the disinformation campaign that has been going on since Trump took office. Plus a lot of inventions by the author for which he is famous.

Wolff admitted on Monday’s “CBS This Morning” that he hasn’t spoken to any cabinet member or the Vice President. Even his pretended interview with Trump turns out to be a hoax. They were just chatting “as so we were friends.” Wolff just wants to show off how talented he is. After the first hype faded away, the author sounds like a total hack.

Wolff portrays Bannon as a victim of various intrigues by the Trump family in addition to that hinting indirectly that he is the primary informant of his book. Blaming the meeting between Kushner, Manafort and Don Jr. with the Russian lawyer at Trump tower, Bannon could have led a trail for Robert Mueller to dig into the families businesses in New York City. In this respect, the book can’t be any worse than the Russia gate junk.

That the mainstream media gives credence to such a fictional work speaks volumes. Wolff is not only a savvy journalist but also a smooth customer. The only victim of this work of fiction is Steve Bannon. With his indiscreetness, He shot himself in the foot and retracted unprofessionally according to the motto to make the best out of a lousy job. It seems as if Bannon found a new financial promoter, a billionaire named Miles Kwok, also known as Geo Wen Gui. Apparently, Bannon and National Security adviser A. R. McMaster prevented his expulsion.

Wolff’s book lacks substance. It’s a compilation of gossip and story-telling. It won’t change one jota of the people’s opinion of Trump. No one is more responsible for his chaotic image than the US President himself.

By Ayan Tewari*

In 2017, Indian security forces (SFs) initiated a more focused approach to dealing with militants in Kashmir, resulting in the killing of 218 terrorists so far. Although these operations were hailed as a success, the high civilian deaths (218 militants: 37 civilians in 2017 compared to 165 militants: 14 civilians in 2016) however, have led to more resentment towards India and will almost certainly lead to further cycles of violence. To offset this, the government should intensify the carrot component of its carrot-and-stick approach particularly vis-à-vis the much ignored issue of alternatives for socialisation available for youth in Kashmir.

The July 2016 death of Burhan Wani sparked widespread protests for nearly half a year. After the protests had petered out by end 2016, SFs began Operation All-Out in 2017 – a more intensive approach that emphasised zero tolerance and immediate confrontation with separatist cells as and when they arose. Consequently, SFs have killed nearly all terrorists they have encountered, severely eroding the Hizbul Mujahideen’s command structure. For example, Wani’s successor Sabzar Bhat was killed shortly after Wani, leaving little to no room for knowledge and institutional transfer, thus disrupting the Hizb’s operational ability. However, this security success was accompanied by a 150 per cent increase in civilian deaths since 2017 began.

These deaths diminish the long term effectiveness of security operations as it creates downstream radicalisation, potentially feeding a new generation of terrorists few years down the line. Deaths alone do not lead to radicalisation. However, in Kashmir, these deaths combine in a toxic cocktail of injuries, genuine or perceived harassment by security forces, and a complex set of grievances along with the lack of non-political outlets for pent up rage.

While most Indians considered Wani a terrorist, many in Kashmir viewed him as a hero fighting for freedom against the oppressors. This highlights the fact that icons for Kashmiri youth tend to be violent and political. While there are many reasons for such rage, one important aspect that is often ignored is that much of this has to do with the absence of alternatives for socialising such as cinema halls, sports, etc. Social mingling takes place largely at the mosque, usually to a sermon laced with political overtones. This funnels the youth (who may not naturally be politically inclined) towards politics, which in Kashmir, leads to a bigger pool of disaffected individuals, and hence probability for radicalisation.

When youth spend a large chunk of their free time at politically active mosques listening to politicised sermons, radicalisation seems imminent. Optimally addressing this psychological issue would involve providing leisure alternatives for Kashmiris. Recreational activities like sports provide youth with both a diversion and a sense of community (and thus, alternatives for identity, peer groups and social validation structures). For example, Afshan Ashiq, a 21-year old disaffected Kashmiri with a history of pelting stones at SFs, and who was on a path towards radicalisation, chose an alternative when one was made available. She now leads the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) state girls football team as captain and is seen as a role model by many. This potent ability to create role models in the region was something previously only achieved by ‘martyrs’ like Wani. When Kashmiri singers, sportspersons and actors emerge, they have the potential to replace militants in popularity among youth.

Recognising this, the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) led coalition government in J&K has implemented some policies to address these sociological issues. There is now a heavy emphasis on sport as well as on making recreational activities such as rafting, hiking etc, more accessible to the public. Similarly, tentative moves have been made towards reopening cafes, cinema halls and other trappings of normalcy. Additionally, the government is also focusing on a variety of skill-building initiatives for the Kashmiri youth.

Sensing the danger of a shrinking recruitment pool, militant groups and their votaries have opposed these moves. However, this is not the only hurdle. According a PDP member interviewed for this article, progress on these initiatives has also been slow politically because these activities are primarily targeted at 15-18 year old youths – i.e. those who are ineligible to vote, and thus not electorally salient for political parties focussed on elections. If this argument has salience, it means an important demographic is being ignored due to its lack of a political voice. Addressing the socio-psychological needs of this demographic, along with educational, economic and other social issues, will be needed to reduce future disruptions in the valley.

While current operations may be temporarily successful in reducing militancy, the civilian administration must intensify their carrot approach to match the SF’s stick. These are not binaries and they in fact go hand in hand: the SF’s solving the immediate problem, and civilians ameliorating the medium to long term repercussions. It is therefore important that both the state and the central government recognise, fund and prioritise the baby steps taken towards exposing Kashmiri youth to normalcy. While this is but a small part of the jigsaw that is Kashmir, a balanced approach will go a long way in either ushering in normalcy or at least increasing the time gap between the peaking of violence.

* Ayan Tewari
Research Intern, IPCS

By Karl Romano

Philippine authorities said Thursday they killed five suspects and arrested 95 others in the first anti-narcotics raids of 2018, a month after President Rodrigo Duterte put police back on the frontline of his government’s much-criticized drug war.

The suspects were killed during more than 50 sting operations spread across 12 hours in Bulacan, a suburban area north of the capital Manila, ending before midnight Wednesday, local police chief Senior Supt. Romeo Caramat said.

Twenty-three police stations in Bulacan participated in the operations, which included intelligence operatives and quick-response mobile units, Caramat said in a police report.

“The arrested suspects and confiscated pieces of evidence were brought to Bulacan crime laboratory office for appropriate examination,” a statement issued by Caramat’s office said, adding that appropriate criminal complaints were being read in court against those taken into custody.

Despite the number of arrests and deaths, the drug haul yielded about 171 grams (6 ounces) of methamphetamine and 21 grams (three-quarter ounce) of marijuana. Also seized were nine weapons, including a grenade.

Philippine media reported two suspects were killed in San Jose del Monte city and one each in Malolos city and the towns of Calumpit and Santa Maria.

In August 2017, Bulacan police carried out what was called then a “one time, big time” anti-drug operation resulting in the deaths of nearly 100 suspects.

Among those killed was 17-year-old student Kian Loyd delos Santos. Two other teenagers died in later round-ups, triggering massive street protests and criticism from local and international rights groups, and eventually forcing Duterte to remove police from the lead role in drug operations.

In December, Duterte announced that he was reviving an active role for police, arguing he had promised the electorate that he would rid the country of the drug menace by the time his six-year term ended.

Police place the number of alleged drug dealers and addicts killed since Duterte took power in 2016 to about 4,000, a number far less than estimates by Filipino rights groups, who claim that as many as 12,000 people have died.

Crackdown

The roundup came the same week that Interior Undersecretary Martin Diño, a close Duterte appointee, ordered the country’s nearly 50,000 village chiefs to submit a list of drug dealers and addicts in their respective areas or resign.

Rights groups slammed the order, arguing it was dangerous because any village chief could put the names of anyone, including political enemies, on a list without proper vetting.

A village chief is the highest elected public official at the grassroots level. While they control the country’s smallest administrative political and administration divisions in the country, village chiefs traditionally are courted by higher public officials for their ability to deliver votes during elections.

Earlier, Diño was removed as head of a freeport zone north of Manila, amid reports of alleged abuse of powers. Despite that, Duterte recently named him as an undersecretary at the Interior Department, giving him direct control over the national police force.

On Tuesday, Diño vowed to “make sure that all barangays (local term for villages) all over the Philippines will be fighting against illegal drugs.” He said those who failed to submit a list faced being sacked from their posts.

Previously, Duterte said that nearly half of all village chiefs in the country were involved in the illegal drug trade and actively lobbied to have elections for new village officials canceled last year.

On Thursday, Presidential spokesman Harry Roque did not directly answer whether Diño’s directive was backed by Duterte, a former long-time mayor in the south supported by many village chiefs.

“Those that are being asked are only required to submit names. I am sure there would be investigations to follow,” Roque told a local television station, based on a transcript of an interview his office had released.

He downplayed fears by rights groups that the lists could lead to another round of killings, noting that the names Diño was asking for would be verified by the authorities.

“First, there needs to be an investigation. And if there was truth to the allegation, there are ways to remove a local official from office. Secondly, if there really is evidence they are involved in drugs, a case can be filed in courts,” Roque said.

Felipe Villamor in Manila contributed to this report.

The general public discourse around such events in Iran usually pendulums between the ill-informed and the critically ill-informed.

By Kabir Taneja

Over the past few weeks, Iran, the seat of Shiite Islam and one of the tripoles of influence in the Middle East, saw a spurt of protests erupt across various towns and cities as the country’s large youth demographic voiced their anger against stunted economic conditions, stale job market and the global pandemic of the failures of ‘trickle-down’ economics.

According to figures provided by Iranian reformist parliamentarian Mahmoud Sadeghi, more than 3,700 people have been placed under arrest by the Iranian authorities. This is not the first time protests in Iran have made global headlines, previously, in 2009, similar protests led by economic stagnation and social constrictions erupted in the capital Tehran, only to be quenched effectively by the police forces.

The general public discourse around such events in Iran usually pendulums between the ill-informed and the critically ill-informed. For some reason, in a lot of public perception, including in India, Iran is perceived as a hermit-state. This debris of thought from the post-9/11 era when, during the run-up to the Iraq war, while delivering the State of the Union speech on 29 January 2002, the then US President George W. Bush clubbed Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the ‘axis of evil.’

Prior to this moniker’s aiding the very problematic terminology of ‘war on terror’, American and Iranian ties, while fraught, were still facing towards the positive direction. Perhaps due to these chain of events, perception amongst the generalised debates remains that Iran is some sort of a hermit state, like North Korea, and the truth cannot be further away from such discourse.

Under international sanctions for a good part of the past decade due to its nuclear programme (which Tehran maintains is for peaceful energy purposes), the Iranian economy suffered significantly as foreign investment dried up and international financial highways came under heavy scrutiny for Iranian money.

More than 60 per cent of Iran’s population is estimated to be under 30 years of age (2013 figures as per the World Bank), rendering the issue of employment and economic aspirations one of the biggest challenges to the Government of President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate, trying to end an impasse with the West and open up his country to rapid growth.

Iran holds some of the largest oil and natural gas reserves, and till some years ago, was India’s second largest supplier of crude oil. In fact, the Mangalore oil refinery in southern India was specifically designed to handle the ‘heavy crude’ variety of oil that India imported in large quantities from Iran.

Labelling these Iran protests as ‘revolution’ and thinking any public dissent in the country is a call for regime change, is a disservice both to the Iranian people, who had patiently weathered many storms as their political class negotiated a long and tiresome deal with the P5+1 group of Western nations and came to an agreement, one that was deemed historic then, but today faces the careless disruptions of the international order under US President Donald Trump’s Administration.

While Trump has publicly given support to the Iranian protests (devoid of following an actual policy), President Barack Obama had maintained a distance in 2009 when similar events had occurred, not to spook the Iran nuclear negotiations that he was hoping would become an enduring part of his legacy.

However, the latest protests, as Reza Marashi, Research Director at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), correctly illustrated in his writings, were about the long fight for civil rights in Iran, and not entirely about regime change.

A lot of discontent in Iran currently comes from how the country’s political structures work, the challenges from the conservative lobbies to Rouhani’s presidency and the role of the Ayatollah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (an elite military force only answerable to the Ayatollah) in the country’s economy.

The success of the nuclear deal was important to the Iranians as they expected their economic situation to get significantly better, and the youth, particularly in rural areas, looked towards being gainfully employed.

However, regional politics, the Syrian war, the never-ending race for Shia-Sunni supremacy between Saudi Arabia and Iran saw Tehran increase its spending in arming Shiite rebels across Syria to defeat the Islamic State and other Sunni insurgencies, not necessarily returning the liberated lands to the people, but replacing the vacuum with their own brand of militias.

The costs for these policies were tremendous, both economic and human, so much so that Tehran went ‘shopping’ to Afghanistan for Shiite fighters, bringing them to Iran for training and then deploying them in Syria as local reinforcements started to get exhausted.

These regional battles of hegemony only exasperated an already precarious social situation in the country. While it is not out of the questions that factions within Iran’s polity, looking to undermine a moderate Government, may have played some sort of role in the events that unfolded, the fact that the said ‘uprising’ was leaderless, directionless and largely purposeless yet still getting branded as a revolution with regime change as the end-game, shows more recklessness from a large yet significant part of the Western discourse than just highlighting Iran’s internal political troubles.

This article originally appeared in The Pioneer.

India’s history and culture have been constantly under threat over the centuries. However, the new India is proud of its history, culture and heritage and will do everything possible to retain it despite the surge from motivated lobbies.

It has been widely reported in sections of the media, that Lord Macaulay said the following about India in 1835 in British Parliament.

“I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.”

Now, that he said the above or not is hugely debatable, with sections of the media putting up statistics and figures to quash the claim. That apart, the fact remains that the British, like the Mughals and the Portuguese did perpetrate ‘conquests of sections of the subcontinent’ that went on to be known as India. That a conquest of any land would be incomplete without the ruin and rape of its culture, people, place, heritage and common property is also a given. The British have, all over the world, colonialised masses using the same means, not too diverse from the others like say, Genghis Khan and Alexander.

But, given that the methods of invasion were mostly bloodless, ‘trade’ was the front and the ‘apparent interest’ propped up by the British through the East India Company, the modes of invasion were new, and the narrative made permissible, even enviable, sanctioned by the new ‘rules of history’ laid down by the British.

So, the old gave way to the new and structures were brought down; religions were classified, and Christianity given the edge through legislation that permitted missionaries to spread their faith with wild abandon, even as the others were restricted in practice and reach.

Why, Somnath Temple, which witnessed myriad attacks and subsequent ruination over the years, was finally rebuilt in 1951, and Dr. Rajendra Prasad performed the consecration ceremony with the words “The Somnath Temple signifies that the power of creation is always greater than the power of destruction.”

The present-day construction of the Somnath Temple was completed on December 1, 1995, and the-then President of India, Dr. Shankar Dayal Sharma, dedicated it to the nation. The Shree Somnath Trust even recently declared that non-Hindus will not be allowed to enter the temple premises. The Chairman of the Shree Somnath trust is former Chief Minister of Gujarat Keshubhai Patel and its trustees include Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, former Chief Secretary of Gujarat P. K. Laheri and former Deputy Prime Minister of India Mr. L.K. Advani. There could be no better example of how India’s culture and heritage has been systematically attacked and subverted by cultures to assert their identity. Now, all of that would stop.

The Elephanta Island, known in scriptures as Gharapuri, houses rock carvings of Lord Shiva that were systematically destroyed by the Christian Portuguese soldiers who purposely defaced and damaged the cave temples by using the surfaces as a firing range and target practice.

History is often subjectively portrayed to suit one’s convenience. So, contrarian writer Wendy Doniger maintains that “it was the Marathas who tried to remove that plaster and they caused damage to the artwork in the 17th century.” And, as is the case, there are takers for that theory too. Takers do not resist the theory claiming it to be foreign and mischievous in face of a long-existing theory even backed with historical evidence of the Portuguese having demolished Hindu temples and structures wherever they went.

Try Goa, for instance, the theory of proselytising 15th Century Portuguese colonials who have been historically known to have destroyed Hindu temples across the state was rubbished by the Roman Catholic seminary and associated leaders who claim that by painting pre-colonial Goa as Hindu territory, “there is a direct attempt to turn the historical facts about conversion against the Church and the Christians of today”.

“This political motive of appropriating Goan history is highly reductionist and distortionist in its approach. I have described these attempts as Hindu-ology. In fact, even the word Hindu does not exist in the entire sixteenth century Indo-Portuguese historiography,” said Fr. Victor Ferrao, a dean at the Roman Catholic seminary in a paper, titled The Other Orientalism and the Challenge and Opportunities for the Church in Goa.

Goa, India’s smallest state, has thousands of structures that are associated with Hindu mythology and history. Right from a cave that the Pandavas used during exile at Keri Beach in North Goa, down to Petroglyphs (rock carvings) that are 40,000 years old located at Usgalimal in South Goa, the state is on the way to earning the fame she deserves. And, not for cheap alcohol and drug-laden beaches, sadly associated almost always with Goa.

India’s history and culture have been constantly under threat over the centuries. And, rightly so. The world’s oldest culture isn’t exactly easy to dismiss. It has resisted a surge of demolitions, deadly genocides from the very beginning of time ranging from Muslim attacks to the Jallianwala Baug massacre, and the Bangladesh war. India has remained resilient and every attempt to crush the nation has met with failure.

So, with the recent attention the Taj Mahal has received following motivated propaganda about its selective elimination from the list of Uttar Pradesh’s must-visit sites and the uproar that came along with it, coupled with the insistence of Taj Mahal being as ‘Indian’ and any attempts to delink it from India’s history would be met with vitriolic fervour, is not surprising in the least.

Why, breaking the law, even in contempt of a High Court ruling to prevent coverage and transmission of a skewed, lop-sided, malicious documentary like BBC’s ‘India’s Daughter’ became a fashionable pursuit. The law of the land is now stricter as times have changed, and despite the world media’s feisty reportage, on how India has tackled illegal NGOs, even cracked down on those without FCRA licenses and those that refuse to file their income tax returns, is given the silent treatment it deserves.

The New India is proud of its history, culture and heritage and will do everything possible to retain it despite the surge from resisting motivated lobbies. The emergence of the Ganga and its strategic cleansing through legislation and action; the first-time recognition of River Saryu during Diwali after CM Yogi’s taking over as Uttar Pradesh supremo; the initiation of the Sardar Patel monument dedicated to India’s Independence; the foundation of the world’s highest Shivaji Maharaj memorial; the inclusion of Ahmedabad as India’s first UNESCO World Heritage City and more bear testimony to the fact that India is in safe hands. Hands safer than most others.

The best indicator of a future is past behaviour. And, India has learnt her lessons well. Aware that buckling before anything foreign will sound the death-knell for her culture, she has learned to fight back…and fight hard to retain her history! And where new-found anger towards the new-found change is concerned, just like one was free to write history to suit interest, another’s free to resist it or concurrently change it once again. Two wrongs don’t not make a right for some. But, someone else may disagree to that. And that too is perfectly fine! Remember, it’s a free state!

By Kishore Jayabalan*

Happy New Year! I spent December travelling to Washington DC for an Acton conference on public spirit and public virtue and then led a week-long course on public policy to young evangelical missionaries in Hawaii before spending the holidays in frigid Michigan. Three very different places, to say the least, but yet all within the borders of one nation.

Once I got over the weather shocks to my system, these trips got me thinking what unites those States of America and more broadly about what unites and divides modern peoples in religion and politics, a variant of the “theologico-political problem” modernity attempts to solve. This may sound highfalutin but it’s anything but an abstraction. To put it much too simply: Do we primarily rely on human reason or divine revelation to bring us together? I would dare to say it is the big question behind many of the pressing social issues we face at the beginning of 2018.

I take as my starting point Pope Francis’s most recent World Day of Peace message on migrants and refugees. (I used to take part in the preparations of the World Day of Peace messages at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace from 1999 to 2004, so I maintain some professional interest in these.) Citing his predecessor Benedict XVI, Francis writes that “the wisdom of faith” makes us recognize that we “belong to one family, migrants and the local populations that welcome them, and all have the same right to enjoy the goods of the earth, whose destination is universal, as the social doctrine of the Church teaches. It is here that solidarity and sharing are founded” (n. 3).

Christians believe in one God who is the Father and Creator of all; we are brothers and sisters because we have a common Father. In his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII reiterated the Church’s teaching that all human beings have common parentage in Adam and Eve through whom original sin has been transmitted. The confidence with which Pius defends these dogmas is breathtaking but justified since so much of Christian moral and social teaching depends on them.

Such teachings are also why the Catholic Church speaks of particular political and social issues in universal terms. The particulars, however, are often disputed and lead to divisions, even rebellions against the universal authority of the Church, as Pius and many of his predecessors very well knew. The particular interests, opinions and passions of some can and often do clash with those of others. Nevertheless, the Church would not be truly Catholic if she were to speak in the interests of some at the expense of others.

Catholic Social Teaching (CST) continually refers to the common good as the goal of all social action and policy. There is the common good of each family; the common good of the local community, of the nation and even of all humanity, even if each of these units may have different if not competing understandings of it. The Church urges us to harmonize them all, balancing the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity, private property and the universal destination of goods in a way that respects both the individual and the community. In the case of migrants and refugees, it is why Pope Francis insists on “welcoming, protecting, promoting and integrating,” despite all the challenges that come with it.

But what of those particular concerns that drive politics? Twice in the World Day of Peace message, Francis cites Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris on the “limits” imposed by the common good. Doesn’t this imply that common good may indeed require some communities and nations (smaller ones, for instance) to restrict rather than expand immigration? Just as no single family can be expected to take in every stranger who comes into town, no nation can be expected to show “unlimited” generosity to migrants and refugees. Social cohesion in terms of culture, belief, and tradition are especially challenged by multiculturalism and its underlying cultural relativism which holds that all cultures are inherently equal in moral status.

While CST explicitly speaks of welcoming all, it implicitly recognizes that unlimited multiculturalism is not feasible. The burdens and costs of welcoming newcomers are real and must be shared to be made acceptable. But what happens when some refuse to do so? How much sacrifice can the Church expect of those with limited resources and capacities? A gentleman from Togo told me on one of my recent flights that many of his friends and relatives have endangered their lives to pay traffickers to take them to Libya and then Italy without any assurances of finding jobs or homes in Europe. An “open door” humanitarian policy may well encourage people to take risks they otherwise wouldn’t.

While popes and bishops preach about the duties to the poor and suffering, the dilemma of how to help is usually left for the laity to figure out on their own. It’s probably why the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once dismissed “so-called social justice” in my presence and why he based his jurisprudence on the Constitution rather than the principles of CST or natural law. Agreeing on the validity of the principles is one thing; applying them correctly to particular situations as a politician or judge is another.

Proponents of CST like to claim that no political party or program meets all of its high standards. If it were regarded as a standard or ideal to which we all aspired, it would serve a salutary purpose. As it is, however, CST is more often used to point out the speck in the eye of another while ignoring the beam in one’s own. Hypocrisy may be inevitable in public life, but it’s made worse when cloaked with the mantle of false piety.

So who really governs, God or man? The modern solution to the “theologico-political problem” generally tries to separate Church and State, in some cases essentially privatizing and individualizing religion. A more religious-friendly interpretation maintains a distinction between the spiritual and temporal realms rather than strict separation; even so, the line between them is blurry and difficult to determine in particular cases. Abortion is just one obvious example of why the Church cannot remain indifferent to the laws of a society that teach as much as they sanction.

CST tries to restore a sense of balance and integrity so that the Church can have a public voice without intervening directly into politics. But it also relies upon an inheritance of Christian beliefs and mores that can no longer be assumed and is now under attack in much of the West, and no political solution is in sight. The early Church was persecuted but grew through the examples of the saints and martyrs, many of whom did not set out to change society but eventually did through their holiness. Maybe political success is similar to peace and joy, a by-product of first seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness, rather than something to be sought for its own sake.

About the author:
*Kishore Jayabalan is director of Istituto Acton, the Acton Institute’s Rome office. Formerly, he worked for the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace as an analyst for environmental and disarmament issues and desk officer for English-speaking countries. Kishore Jayabalan earned a B.A. in political science and economics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In college, he was executive editor of The Michigan Review and an economic policy intern for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He worked as an international economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, D.C.

Source:
This article was published by the Acton Institute