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The World’s 50 Most Anti-Christian Countries

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By Courtney Grogan

There are more than 215 million persecuted Christians worldwide according to the 2018 World Watch List, Open Doors USA’s annual ranking of the 50 worst countries for violence and persecution against Christians.

The report found that one in twelve Christians worldwide are victims of violent persecution. Open Doors USA cites the spread of radical Islam and increasing religious nationalism as the two major drivers of global Christian persecution.

North Korea tops the list of worst offenders, as it has for the past 16 years. Although the communist North Korean government claims to provide freedom of religion in its constitution, no one can be openly Christian within the atheist state without facing arrest, re-education in a labor camp, or, in some cases, execution.

Despite the danger, Open Doors USA finds that there has been tremendous growth in underground Christianity in North Korea in the last two decades. The report estimates that there might be up to 300,000 Christians living clandestinely in North Korea.

Afghanistan comes in a close second in this year’s World Watch List ranking. Afghan citizens in this 99 percent Muslim country are banned from becoming Christian. Open Doors USA reports that underground Christians in Afghanistan have been killed by their own family members, who viewed the Christian conversion as a shameful apostasy.

Islamic oppression continues to be a growing concern for many Christians around the world. For eight of the top ten countries on the World Watch List, Islamic extremism is the primary cause of Christian persecution.

Islamic militancy has been on the rise in Somalia, where Christians, if discovered, are often martyred. Christians in Egypt, India, Libya, and Kazakhstan also experienced increased persecution since last year’s report.

Pakistani Christians experienced the most documented violence according to the report. Islamic militants in Pakistan specifically target Christians. A suicide bomb on Easter Sunday 2016 killed 74 people and injured hundreds more.

In addition to the spread of radical Islam, the report identified a rise in religious nationalism and intense persecution in central Asia as major trends in the persecution of Christians. Hindu nationalism has increased in India and Nepal, as has Buddhist nationalism in Burma and Sri Lanka. And persecution of Christians in central Asian nations, including Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan, is intensifying under nationalist, pro-Islamic governments.

Also included on the list were Mexico and Colombia, where organized crime and corruption were cited as the source of Christian persecution.

Open Doors USA documented that 3,066 Christians were killed; 1,252 were abducted; 1,020 were raped or sexually harassed; and 793 churches were attacked within the reporting period for the 2018 World Watch List.

The World Watch List includes specific prayers requests for each of the top 50 countries, recalling Open Doors USA’s founder Brother Andrew’s faith in the power of prayer to aid those who are suffering afar: “Our prayers can go where we cannot … There are no borders, no prison walls, no doors that are closed to us when we pray.”


Romania: Ruling Party Dismisses Second PM In Seven Months

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By Ana Maria Luca

Romania’s Prime Minister Mihai Tudose announced his resignation of Monday night, after six months in office, after the ruling Social Democrat Party leadership withdrew its political backing.

Romania plunged into a major political crisis for the second time in seven months after the party leadership of the ruling Social Democrat Party voted Monday to withdraw their political support for Prime Minister Mihai Tudose.

Tudose said he will submit his resignation by no later than Tuesday morning and will not stay in office as interim prime minister.

“I have no regrets,” he told journalists before he left the Social Democrat leadership meeting on Monday night. “The Social Democrat Party wanted a different cabinet,” Tudose added.

The Social Democrats turned on Tudose after several weeks of growing tensions with leader Liviu Dragnea after the latter came out against Tudose’s push to reshuffle the cabinet and fire several ministers as well as state secretaries that he deemed incompetent.

An open row between Tudose and Interior Minister Carmen Dan, one of Dragnea’s closest allies, over the way the latter handled a pedophilia case in the police force aggravated internal party skirmishes. Dan refused to resign at the Prime Minister’s request, saying she would leave her post only if the party demanded her ouster.

The Social Democrats went through a similar situation in June 2017, when they dismissed their own cabinet after Prime Minister Sorin Grindeanu refused to resign from office after his own party withdrew its political support.

The recent tensions have split Romania’s ruling party, with many members worried about its stability and ability to govern.

Ionut Vulpescu, a former culture minister who was in office until June of last year, wrote on his Facebook account Monday that he was worried that the Social Democrats “cannot manage their own political victory” after winning the 2016 elections. The party has been in a perpetual crisis due to double standards in dealing with some dignitaries.

“The interests of some members are above the interests of the group. And we want to govern successfully,” he said.

The Social Democrats are scheduled to meet on Tuesday morning to discuss the appointment of a new prime minister, which needs to be approved by the president.

Lifting Barriers To Citizenship For Low-Income Immigrants

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Taking the Oath of Allegiance at a naturalization ceremony is an emotional moment for many immigrants, and for good reason: it is the culmination of an often arduous process and many years of striving. Citizenship also opens a new chapter marked by possibility, from better job prospects to full participation in civic life.

Yet for many immigrants who aspire to become U.S. citizens, that moment never arrives. Since the 1970s, naturalization rates in the United States have lagged behind those of other major host countries. It’s a striking disparity given that the vast majority of immigrants in the United States express interest in citizenship. And since gaining citizenship often boosts immigrants’ social mobility and integration, the fact that so many are left behind points to a troubling loss of solidarity for their host communities.

What holds them back? Why are some immigrants more likely than others to complete the naturalization process?

New research from Stanford University’s Immigration Policy Lab, in collaboration with researchers at George Mason University and the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy at the University at Albany, provides the first concrete evidence of a major barrier to citizenship for low-income immigrants. The findings help explain why citizenship-promotion efforts face significant challenges, and they provide a blueprint for solutions to ensure that all immigrants have equal access to citizenship and its benefits.

A Life-Changing Program

In seeking to understand disparities in naturalization patterns, previous studies have focused on the immigrants themselves–individual characteristics like language skills, resources, or country of origin. Here, the researchers considered an external factor out of immigrants’ control: the high costs of the citizenship application process.

For many low-income immigrants, the price tag is daunting: $725 just to file the application, plus hundreds or even thousands more if you need English classes or consultations with immigration lawyers. Charitable organizations have stepped up to provide free language training, legal advice, and help navigating the paperwork. But the application fee has only become more burdensome, rising by 800 percent in real terms since 1985, when it was $35 (or $80.25 in today’s dollars). The federal government offers a fee waiver for the poorest immigrants–those with incomes below 150% of the poverty line–but for many others who aren’t destitute but struggle to make ends meet, that fee alone can put citizenship out of reach.

A new study reveals financial barriers to citizenship for low-income immigrants. Credit  Immigration Policy Lab, Stanford University
A new study reveals financial barriers to citizenship for low-income immigrants.
Credit
Immigration Policy Lab, Stanford University

To address this potentially pivotal financial obstacle, IPL teamed up with the New York State Office for New Americans (ONA) and two funders dedicated to improving the lives of vulnerable New Yorkers, Robin Hood, and New York Community Trust. Together they developed an innovative, public-private program called NaturalizeNY, which offers low-income immigrants an opportunity to win a voucher covering the naturalization application fee.

Veyom Bahl, a managing director at Robin Hood, said, “Robin Hood is proud to partner with the world-class researchers at the Stanford Immigration Policy Lab. Like us, they are committed to helping immigrant families build a strong footing for a new life in the United States. This research will help foundations, community-based organizations, and policymakers alike re-think how we invest in our communities for maximum impact.”

NaturalizeNY also connects registrants with application assistance from ONA’s network of nonprofit service providers. New York’s leading immigrant service organizations, including CUNY Citizenship Now!, Hispanic Federation, and Catholic Charities, were also integral in promoting and implementing the program.

“This was a truly first-of-a-kind program, where a state agency, philanthropies, academics, and nonprofits created a way to provide direct financial support to help low-income immigrants apply for citizenship. The Immigration Policy Lab was excited to partner in its design and evaluation so everyone involved could understand its impact on immigrants and the New York community,” said Michael Hotard, an IPL program manager.

New York is home to the nation’s second-largest immigrant population, and its metro area has about 160,000 low-income immigrants eligible for citizenship. With a registration website in seven languages, NaturalizeNY focused on relatively poor New Yorkers who, by virtue of income or lack of eligibility for government benefits like food stamps or cash assistance, did not qualify for the existing federal fee waiver program.

NaturalizeNY used a lottery to award the 336 available vouchers, leaving 527 registrants without one. By following the two groups to see how many completed the citizenship application, researchers could measure the power of financial assistance, and in turn determine how much the costs may discourage others from naturalizing.

The results were unequivocal: the vouchers roughly doubled the application rate, from 37 percent among those without a voucher to 78 percent among recipients. The vouchers proved particularly effective for those who registered in Spanish; their application rate rose by 51 percent compared to a 36 percent rise among English speakers.

“Because NaturalizeNY uses a lottery system to equitably distribute vouchers to eligible registrants, for the first time we have clear causal evidence as to the effect of application fee vouchers on citizenship decisions. The magnitude of the effect suggests that it’s a critical lever to improve low-income immigrants’ access to citizenship”, said Jens Hainmueller, a professor of political science at Stanford and IPL co-director.

The Deeper Challenges of Poverty

For the poorest immigrants, however, even eliminating the application cost isn’t necessarily enough to pave the way toward citizenship. They may not know that they’re eligible for a fee waiver, or they may find the process too difficult if they’re working several jobs, caring for children or elderly relatives, or unable to get assistance with the application.

Do these kinds of disadvantages keep these immigrants from becoming citizens? To find out, researchers identified 1,760 immigrants who registered for NaturalizeNY but weren’t entered into the lottery because they likely qualified for the federal fee waiver. While the voucher group’s average annual household income was $19,000 per person, this group’s average was just $7,500. Everyone in this group received a message during registration informing them that, based on their responses, they likely could apply for citizenship without cost and that assistance was available. 1,124 then received various “nudges” encouraging them to apply and to visit a local service provider for help navigating the process.

These nudges mimicked the real-world interventions many groups rely on to reach immigrants in need: emails, phone calls, text messages, an official letter by regular mail, and a $10 MetroCard intended to allay the cost of commuting to a service provider. Yet none of these encouragements made a significant difference in application rates beyond the 44 percent for those who received no additional encouragements.

In follow-up surveys, many participants said they had been too busy to apply. But when researchers returned to the data, they found that busyness couldn’t be the whole answer: the nudges were just as ineffective for single people as for members of large households, and for those of working age and retirement age.

“That so many ended up not applying indicates that challenges to naturalization run deeper than financial constraints,” said Duncan Lawrence, IPL executive director. “It’s clear that we have more to learn about what sorts of cost-effective nudges may or may not work. Raising awareness of the fee waiver itself may be an important piece of the puzzle, and we are actively working to understand how learning about the fee waiver affects application rates.”

Citizenship and Social Mobility

For policymakers looking to address social inequality and give low-income immigrants a potential pathway to the middle class, the voucher results speak volumes. The current naturalization system imposes prohibitive costs on exactly those immigrants who might stand to benefit the most from the opportunities citizenship brings.

NaturalizeNY could inspire other cities and states to create similar public-private partnerships. ONA director Laura Gonzalez-Murphy emphasized the project’s actionable insights, saying, “The New York State Office for New Americans Opportunity Centers are leaders on the ground, establishing strong relationships and trust with immigrants and refugees from across the world. We are always eager to eliminate barriers for these individuals and help them on their path to citizenship. Thanks to our partners, including Stanford, George Mason, and SUNY Albany, we now have a unique project to paint a real picture of the current immigration system and see where opportunities for positive change may arise.”

At the federal level, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) recently lowered the fee for applicants between 150 and 200 percent of the poverty level. As this research illustrates, however, the financial barrier remains decisive for low-income immigrants above that range. Expanding this tiered system, with wealthier applicants paying more, would allow USCIS to cover its administrative costs while keeping citizenship affordable for all.

These are relatively simple projects to fund and administer, and they have a potentially big long-term payoff: if becoming an American citizen makes immigrants more likely to pursue higher education, start a business, or enter a profession, then boosting naturalization rates would make for better integrated, more prosperous communities.

Serbia, Montenegro Could Join EU In 2025

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By Rikard Jozwiak

(RFE/RL) — Montenegro and Serbia should be ready for EU membership in 2025 and Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Macedonia should be well-advanced on their path to EU accession by then, according to a draft of the European Commission’s Western Balkans strategy seen by RFE/RL.

The strategy, which is expected to be made public on February 6, is part of an EU effort to breathe new life into the accession process for the six Western Balkan countries that remain outside the bloc.

The draft seen by RFE/RL states that “the Western Balkan partners now have a historic window of opportunity” and that “for the first time their accession perspective has a best-case framework” — but adds that the timeline set out in the paper is realistic only if there is “strong political will, delivery of real reforms, and lasting solutions to disputes with neighbors.”

The timeline is “ambitious and is meant to be an incentive,” it says.

According to the document, 2019 will be a crucial year.

Albania and Macedonia should start EU accession negotiations by the end of 2019, provided that Tirana has implemented judicial reform and Skopje has resolved a bitter name dispute with Greece that has dogged the country since it gained independence from the collapsing Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the document says.

Greek and Macedonian negotiators will meet in New York on January 17 and leaders of both countries — as well as the UN envoy dealing with the matter, Matthew Nimetz — have said there is a window of opportunity to resolve the issue in 2018.

At the end of 2019, EU member states should also be in a position to grant EU candidate-country status to Bosnia-Herzegovina, according to draft.

It says that Serbia and Kosovo “will need at the latest by this stage to have achieved comprehensive normalization of relations, which should open the way for further substantial progress by Kosovo on the path to European integration.”

The EU-sponsored dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina started in 2011 and has so far produced agreements in areas such as freedom of movement, justice, and the status of the Serbian minority in Kosovo — as well as enabling Serbia to start EU accession talks and Brussels to sign an Association Agreement with Kosovo.

In a nod to fractious relationships between many of the counties in the region, the document states that “the EU cannot and will not import bilateral disputes. This is why all Western Balkans partners concerned must resolve such disputes as a matter of urgency ahead of their future accession to the European Union.”

It also underlines that “as a matter of principle, the front-runners on the EU path have a strategic interest in being advocates, not spoilers, of the aspirations of their neighbors.”

By 2023, the strategy says, EU member states should be in a position to agree to closing EU accession negotiations with Serbia and Montenegro, and Bosnia should open accession talks the same year. EU accession treaties with Serbia and Montenegro should be ratified by all EU member states two years later, allowing for membership by the end of 2025.

The timeline is “indicative only,” the document states, saying that “countries can move faster but may also move slower.”

EU diplomats with whom RFE/RL has spoken under the condition of anonymity have said they believe that many EU member states, particularly France and Germany, will find the time frame too ambitious and would prefer if no dates were mentioned.

The strategy might be discussed by EU heads of state and government already at their next summit in Brussels, in March, and is certain to be discussed during the EU-Western Balkans summit in Sofia on May 17.

Study Shows How Olympic Games Affect The Stock Market

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New research reveals how global sports events such as the Olympic Games can affect stock market activity.

The study, by academics at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Nottingham Trent University (NTU), finds that when a country wins many Olympic medals, national stock market activity in terms of trading volume decreases. However, stock market returns appear to be largely unaffected.

The researchers argue that the drop in trading is because investors, along with the whole population, are distracted. Furthermore, the level of distraction increases with sports success.

For example, for each gold medal won by the US, the trading volume in the S&P 500 firms is almost 3% less on the following day. For Germany and South Korea, this decrease is even higher at 6.7% and 7.3%, respectively. Trading volumes are also significantly less for sponsoring firms following Olympic success in the country they are headquartered.

Authors Raphael Markellos, professor in finance at UEA’s Norwich Business School, and Dr Jessica Wang, senior lecturer at NTU’s Nottingham Business School, examined whether the stock market impact of the Games and gold medals is due to a shift in the mood of investors or a distraction of their attention.

A reason put forward for hosting Olympics Games is that they have well-being, feel-good or happiness benefits for the population. However, the study results, published in The European Journal of Finance, do not confirm this, as they find no significant link between success in Olympic Games and sentiment among investors. The authors conclude that the Games affect the attention of investors rather than their mood.

The results are based on the analysis of a new dataset of medals over four Summer Olympic Games (Sydney/2000, Athens/2004, Beijing/2008, London/2012) for eight major economies (US, UK, France, Australia, Netherlands, Germany, South Korea, Japan) and five multinational sponsoring firms (Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Panasonic, Visa, Samsung).

Prof Markellos said: “The central idea underlying our study is not new. Since Roman times we have used the phrase panem et circenses – bread and circuses – to describe how public games and other mass spectacles can divert attention. The idea is still very popular, as exemplified by The Hunger Games, the popular trilogy and film series.

“Our results support survey evidence from the London 2012 Games suggesting that around one in four people reported that they are likely to watch or listen to the events coverage at work. We also know that TV viewership in the UK over the Games increased by almost 15%.

“We are not saying in our study that investor sentiment or mood is not important in sports or other large events. However, attention is the bottleneck, a prerequisite for shifts in the mood of investors, which itself is a necessary but not sufficient condition for financial impact. If investors are distracted by a sports loss, for example, the decline in their mood may not find its way into the stock market.”

Dr Wang added: “The stock market patterns we detect are exploitable through an Olympic medal-based volatility trading strategy. We show in our study that such a strategy produces superior profits compared to those from a passive approach. Other significant non-economic events related to sports but also to weather, environment and holidays may also hide opportunities for investors.”

‘Is there an Olympic Gold Medal Rush in the Stock Market?’, Jessica Wang and Raphael Markellos, is published in The European Journal of Finance.

New Record At Ultracold Neutron Source In Mainz

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The TRIGA research reactor at Mainz University improved the yield of its ultracold neutron source by a factor of 3.5 to 8.5 ultracold neutrons per cubic centimeter

Some ten years ago, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) entered a new field of research by starting to generate ultracold neutrons (UCN) for use in fundamental research in physics. Now that the new upgrade was installed, the participating physicists and chemists can report another major breakthrough. They have been able to increase the UCN yield of their source by a factor of 3.5. This means that the prerequisites are now in place that are needed to begin the more sensitive measurements required to determine the lifetime of the free neutron.

Neutrons do not normally exist in a free state but are instead bound as neutral particles within the atomic nucleus. Free neutrons are unstable and decay with a lifetime of approximately 15 minutes. The TRIGA Mainz research reactor can generate thermal neutrons, which—by being brought into contact with solid deuterium at roughly minus 270 degrees Celsius—are furthermore slowed down so that they travel at just approximately five meters per second. At this velocity, free neutrons can be stored and utilized in experiments. Scientists involved in fundamental research are particularly interested in determining the properties of these free neutrons, especially their lifetime and electric dipole moment, by means of highly accurate measurements. These have recently been supplemented by experiments to determine the electric charge of the neutron. “The limiting factor in all these experiments and measurements is dictated by the density of ultracold neutrons we can achieve,” explained Professor Werner Heil, one of the scientists at the UCN facility of Mainz University.

Scientists all around the world are currently developing new UCN sources. The Mainz TRIGA reactor can generate neutrons in pulse mode operation, which means that the reactor is pulsed every five minutes and thereby delivers a high neutron flux. After decelerating these neutrons using a block of solid deuterium, they are passed through a neutron guide, similar to a fiber-optic cable, for use in experiments outside the biological shield of the reactor. Besides the source upgrade the infrastructure has also been further improved. The installation of a helium liquefier directly on site provides for more effective cooling of the deuterium crystal and creates excellent conditions for experiments to be run over long time periods. The neutrons from the reactor are transported to the site of experiments via electropolished stainless-steel tubes with an extremely smooth internal surface that prevents neutron losses. These tube inner walls have now received a new coating of a nickel-58-molybdenum alloy to further enhance their performance.

Internationally competitive UCN source in Mainz

With this set of measures, the scientists have succeeded in storing 8.5 UCN per cubic centimeter. “Compared to our previous results we were able to increase the UCN yield by a factor of 3.5,” emphasized Professor Norbert Trautmann of the JGU Institute of Nuclear Chemistry. The storage vessel employed was a standardized stainless-steel cylinder, specially supplied by the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland for normed measurements. This vessel used for a comparative study of ultracold neutron sources in operation has a volume of 32 liters, which corresponds to typical storage vessels for UCN experiments. This setup is generally regarded as the most reliable way of undertaking the corresponding measurements. A density of 8.5 UCN per cubic centimeter puts Mainz in the premier league in this respect. “We are now fully competitive with the world’s leading institutes in the field,” stated Heil.

“The increased UCN density is particularly important for lifetime experiments, which should start soon,” added Professor Tobias Reich, head of the JGU Institute of Nuclear Chemistry, which accommodates the TRIGA reactor. The experiments will be performed within the framework of the Precision Physics, Fundamental Interactions and Structure of Matter (PRISMA) Cluster of Excellence at Mainz University, which has provided funds for the development of infrastructure and for personnel at the Mainz UCN source. Thanks to the improved performance, the scientists are confident of achieving an enhanced quality of their experiments in the future in a much shorter time. Exactly determining the lifetime of the free neutron is of major interest because the two commonly used methods, i.e., storing UCN in material vessels and the ‘neutron beam method’ used to detect decay products (protons) in flight, yield different results. This may be due to either unrecognized systematic errors or to possible exotic decay channels, an indicator for physics beyond the Standard Model.

The UCN measurements were carried out using beam tube D of TRIGA Mainz. This source is mainly operated in pulse mode and is also available to external users. “For future experiments, such as lifetime measurements, we will be able to utilize the source in double-shift operation for three weeks from 8 a.m. to midnight,” added Dr. Christopher Geppert, manager of the TRIGA Mainz.

Bibi’s Son Or Three Men In A Car – OpEd

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No, I don’t want to write about the affair of Ya’ir Netanyahu. I refuse adamantly. No force in the world will compel me to do so.

Yet here I am, writing about Ya’ir, damn it. Can’t resist.

And perhaps it is really more than a matter of gossip. Perhaps it is something that we cannot ignore.

It is all about a conversation between three young man in a car, some two years ago.

One of the young men was Ya’ir, the eldest of the two sons of the Prime Minister.

Ya’ir is named after the leader of the “Stern Gang”, whose real name was Abraham Stern. The original Ya’ir split from the Irgun underground in 1940, when Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany. While the Irgun stopped its actions against the British government for the time being, Stern demanded the very opposite: exploit the moment in order to get the British out of Palestine. He was shot by the British police.

The modern Ya’ir and his two friends were on a drunken tour of Tel Aviv strip-tease joints, an appellation which often seems to be a polite way of describing a brothel.

Somebody took the trouble to record the conversation of the young men – the sons of the Prime Minister and two of the richest “tycoons” in the country.

This recording has now surfaced. Since the publication, hardly anyone in Israel is talking about anything else.

According to the recording, Ya’ir demanded from of his friend, Nir Maimon, 400 shekels (about 100 dollars), in order to visit a prostitute. When the friend refused, Ya’ir exclaimed: “My father gave your father a concession worth a billion dollars, and you refuse to give me 400 shekels?”

The concession in question concerns the rich gas fields out in the sea near Israel’s shores.

In an especially disgusting display of his utter contempt for the female sex, Ya’ir also offered to provide all his friends with the sexual services of his ex-girlfriend.

This recording raises a whole pile of questions, each more unpleasant than the next.

First of all: who made it? Apart from Ya’ir and his two pals, there were only two persons present; the driver of the car and a bodyguard.

This raises some more questions. First, why is the 26-year old man provided with bodyguards at all, and for a tour of strip-tease joints in particular?

Ya’ir has no official function. No son or daughter of any former prime minister has ever been provided with bodyguards. No known danger threatens this particular son. So why must I pay for one?

Second, what about the driver? Ya’ir was riding in a government car, driven by a government driver. Why? What right has he to a government car and to a government driver, in general – and in particular for such an escapade?

The episode has drawn the attention of the public to this son of privilege.

Who is Ya’ir Netanyahu? What does he do for a living? The simple answer: Nothing.

He has no profession. He has no job. He lives in the state-owned official residence in Jerusalem and eats at the state’s expense.

What about his record? The only service he ever performed was as a soldier at the office of the army spokesman – not much risk of meeting flying bullets there. You need a lot of pull to land such a cozy job in the army.

Every reader can ask himself or herself: where was he or she when they were 26 years old?

Speaking for myself, at that age I had behind me several years of service in the Irgun underground, a year of continual fighting in a renowned army commando unit, a battle wound, and the beginning of my career as the editor-in-chief of a belligerent news magazine. I have earned my living since the age of 15. That is not something special to be proud of – many young people of my generation have the same past (except the journalistic part, of course.)

Still, this part of the story can be explained by the character of this particular young man. Can a parent be held responsible for the character of his offspring?

Like many politicians, Netanyahu had no time for his children. It’s the mother who bears most of the responsibility.

Sarah Netanyahu, known as “Sarah’le”, is generally disliked. A former airplane stewardess, who “caught” Binyamin at an airport duty-free shop and became his third wife, is a haughty and quarrelsome person, who is in perpetual conflict with her government-paid household personnel. Some of these quarrels reach the courts.

So this is all a family affair, except that it raises some profound political questions.

What is the social setting of the Prime Minister, himself the son of a poor university professor and a government employee for almost all his life?

His offspring consorts with the sons of the country’s richest peoples, who are enriching themselves with the active help of the Prime Minister, – Netanyahu influences the government funding of big projects. At the moment, the police are conducting at least four separate investigations into Netanyahu’s personal economic affairs.

Practically all of Netanyahu’s personal associates and friends are under police investigation. His closest friend, lawyer and relative is under investigation concerning the acquisition of immensely expensive German-made submarines. The navy claims that it does not need all of them.

In his private life, Netanyahu is being investigated for receiving for a long time cases of the most expensive Cuban cigars from super-rich “friends”, for whom he provided some services. Sarah’le is investigated for receiving, on demand, a regular supply of very expensive pink champagne from another billionaire, whom she also asked to buy her jewelry.

This entire atmosphere of public and private corruption at the top of the state is very much removed from our past. It is something new, reflecting the Netanyahu era.

One could not even imagine anything like this in the times of David Ben-Gurion. His son, Amos, was implicated in some affairs which my magazine exposed, but nothing even remotely resembling this.

Menachem Begin lived for many years as an MK in the same two-room apartment where he had hidden as the most wanted terrorist in British Palestine. Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres all lived in modest circumstances.

Public humor calls Netanyahu “king” and even “emperor” and speaks of the “royal family”. Why?

One reason is certainly the time factor. Netanyahu is now in his fourth term of office. That is much too much.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Lord Acton remarked. One can replace “absolute” with “long-term”.

A person in power is surrounded by temptations, flatterers, corruptors, and as time goes by, his resistance wanes. That, alas, is human.

After the endless presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a relatively honest and effective chief executive, the American people did something extremely wise: it limited a president to two terms. I also have come to the conclusion that eight years is exactly right.

(That applies to myself, too. I was a Member of Parliament for ten years. In retrospect I have drawn the conclusion that eight years should have been enough. During my last two years I was less enthusiastic, less combative)

I don’t hate Binyamin Netanyahu, as many Israelis do. He does not really interest me as a person. But I believe that he is a danger to the future of Israel. His obsession with clinging to power makes him sell out our national interests to interest groups, not just to billionaires but also to the corrupt religious establishment and many others.

Such a man is unable to make peace, even if he wanted to. Making peace demands strength of character, like taking the risk of being overthrown. Such audacity does not even enter Netanyahu’s mind.

Tell me who your son is, and I’ll tell you who you are.

Ron Paul: Earmarks Are Not The Problem – OpEd

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Last week President Trump urged Congress to reassert its constitutional authority to direct how federal agencies spend taxpayer dollars. Ironically, many constitutional conservatives and libertarians disagree with the president. The reason is, President Trump wants Congress to reassert its authority by bringing back earmarks.

Earmarks are line items in spending bills directing federal agencies to spend federal funds on specific projects in a representative or senator’s district or state. Congress ended the practice of earmarks several years ago after a public outcry fueled by a widespread misunderstanding of the issue.

Earmarks are added to spending bills after the spending levels have been determined. Therefore, earmarks do not increase federal spending. What earmarks do is limit the federal bureaucrats’ ability to decide how to spend taxpayer money.

When I served in Congress, I was amazed when self-proclaimed constitutionalists complained about how earmarks prevented funding of federal bureaucrats’ priorities. These “constitutionalists” seem to have forgotten that the Constitution gives Congress sole authority over deciding how taxpayer dollars should be spent.

My support for earmarks in Congress did not add one penny to the spending in the bills. I believed that some of the tax money sent to Washington should actually make it back to Congressional districts rather than remain in the hands of Washington bureaucrats. In the end, I always voted against final passage of the bloated spending bills.

Some call earmarks a gateway drug to big spending. They point to how congressional leadership denied earmarks to members unless the members voted for big spending and other anti-liberty legislation. It is true that congressional leadership used earmarks to reward and punish members. During my years in Congress, earmarks for my district were stripped from bills in an (unsuccessful) attempt to make me stop voting against unconstitutional legislation.

Congressional leaders do not need earmarks to reward or punish members. They can, for example, deny plum committee assignments to those who refuse to toe the party line, or discourage donors from supporting them.

Presidents can still use the promise of federal funds to influence congressional votes. “Presidential earmarks” were crucial to passing Obamacare, and President Trump has threatened to withhold aid from states whose senators oppose his agenda. The removal of earmarks has given the president even greater influence over the legislative branch!

The fact that there are more representatives and senators willing to vote against big government than in past years has nothing to do with the lack of earmarks. Instead, the liberty movement has led to more liberty-minded members being elected to the House and Senate.

While the ideas of liberty are growing in popularity, the majority of the people and certainly most politicians still believe the US government should run the economy, run the world, and run our lives. This misplaced faith in big government, not the presence of earmarks, is why most politicians vote for big spending. No politician ever said, “Now that I can’t receive earmarks, I am abandoning my support for the welfare-warfare state.”

Earmarks are a way for elected representatives to ensure their constituents’ tax dollars are spent in a manner that matches constituent priorities. Earmarks do not by themselves expand government. Those who oppose earmarks should work to stop so many Americans from demanding government-provided economic and personal security. Earmarks are not the cause of runaway spending, and removing them has done little or nothing to shrink government and regain our liberties.

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.


Yesterday’s ‘Shithole Countries’ Can Become Classy Places Donald, And Vice Versa – OpEd

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When Donald Trump referred to countries like Nigeria and really, all of Africa, and the long-suffering island of Haiti in the Caribbean as “shitholes” to a bunch of stunned members of Congress yesterday, he was not just showing his deeply-rooted ugly racist self, but also his profound ignorance about the world — and his own country.

The truth is that yesterday’s “shithole countries” often become today’s modern success stories. Norway is a case in point. As late as the early 1960s, Norway, as Paul Thornton, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, himself a descendant of Norwegian immigrants to the US, writes,  once was “the shithole of Scandinavia,” its people viewed by more prosperous and modern Swedes and Danes as poor, ignorant farmers, Then the country struck oil in the North Sea, and since then, avoiding going the route of many oil-producing nations, has become one of the richest countries in the world on a per-capita basis, with a standard of living about 25% higher than ours here in the US, and with the wealth much more evenly and fairly distributed, too.

Why can’t the US get immigrants from Norway, instead of “shithole” countries in Africa and the Caribbean, the president asked? Well, because nobody in Norway, with its gold-plated free national health care system, excellent and well-funded retirement system and educational system, etc., would want to live here, duh. In fact, Thornton says many second and third-generation Norwegians living in the US are looking at whether they might have a chance of getting citizenship rights in Norway these days.

I know what I’m talking about. Back in 1991 when my I got a Fulbright professorship to China and moved for a year with my family to Shanghai, which at the time was one of China’s wealthier cities, the place was, frankly, what you’d call a “shithole.”  Most people, including professors at Fudan University, a leading institution of higher education where I was placed to teach journalism, were living in one or two-room concrete flats with no heat and only cold water, often without even a private bathroom or kitchen. (Our daughter’s local elementary school had no heat either, so in the winter, they left the windows open to warm the classrooms up during the daytime, while the kids wore gloves with the tips cut off so they could use their pencils.) As for working class people, many were living in far worse accommodations. The air in winter was filled with soot as people tried to keep warm with charcoal stoves in their apartments, which caused everyone to suffer wracking coughs, myself included.

Meanwhile, the streets were clogged with millions of bicycles every day because there was only minimal public transportation in the form of rickety buses that were packed as tightly as canned sardines and that had to crawl their way through rivers of people pedaling their bikes slowly to and from work, often for hours each way.

And Shanghai was about as good as it got. If you went into the countryside, peasants were living in hovels. For bathrooms, they used cramped stone public outhouses where the stench of urine and yes, shit, was so overpowering one had to take long deep breaths before entering, and then hope to be able to hold it until one was done and could escape into the open air.

There are still plenty of places in China, a huge country of 1.4 billion people, that might qualify, in the president’s colorful language, as “shitholes,” but most are much better. Shanghai, meanwhile, in the intervening 25 years since I left, is a modern metropolis. Most of the bikes have vanished, replaced not just by cars and motor-scooters, but by a modern 400-mile subway system as large as New York City’s, and even a mag-lev train from the city’s center to a gleaming new international airport, which whisks passengers at a speed of 225 mph so smoothly you don’t know you’re moving unless you look at the blurred landscape out the windows.

High-speed rail lines whisk people from Shanghai to other similarly modern cities like Beijing and Guangzhou at speeds in excess of 150 mph, making it faster to go by rail from city center to city center than to take a plane.

The truth is, Mr. President, viewed from Shanghai today, America really looks a lot like a “shithole country.”  It certianly looks that way from the perspective of a lot of places I’ve been: Germany, Austria, Finland, Japan and even little Taiwan for example. And despite all your talk about a huge infrastructure program, you haven’t done squat to improve things.

This is a country that has ignored its cities, allowing them to sink into decay and squalor. It has also forgotten its rural regions. And that’s not the fault of the people who live there. It’s because a corrupt political system at all levels — federal, state and local — has defunded them, leaving them jobless, homeless, and with decrepit infrastructure.  I’m sure you’ll blame the local people, but truth to tell, those are in many cases the very (white) people you call “the forgotten Americans.”

You told them you were going to ride to their assistance as president, but you’ve done the opposite. Most of them are so poor they depend on our crappy Medicaid program for their health care and you and your Republican enablers in Congress are cutting that drastically, which will leave them without health care. Meanwhile, their towns are going bust trying to come up with funds to repair aging water systems, worn-out roads and underfunded, overcrowded schools. You’re doing nothing about that. Their homes are often trailers because they can’t afford a real house.

A whole generation of Americans is entering adulthood a collective $1.3 trillion in debt because there’s no system of true public higher education. Instead so-called public colleges and universities today cost almost as much to attend as private institutions. Why? Because rich jerks like you don’t think that educating Americans is the government’s job, and having an educated public is not in the national interest.

America isn’t entirely a “shithole,” because our wealthy, like you, and even the upper middle class, can hide from all the shit around them caused by government tax and spending policies that favor them over the broader mass of the population by staying safely in their gated housing communities built in economically segregated jurisdictions. But that leaves the rest of the country going to the dogs while those in the gated and segregated communities like you don’t give a shit.

Eventually, the way things are going, you’ll be presiding over a “shithole country” yourself.

We’re pretty close to being there now, in my opinion, with more than half of each year’s entire federal tax take going to fund a bloated military that it looks like you want to keep sending off to the far corners of the earth to make shitholes out of other already struggling lands.

Matter of fact, a number of the places you consider to be “shitholes,” like Haiti, Angola, the Congo, and probably Yemen and Libya, are suffering from grinding poverty in large part because of the actions of this country. Look it up. The US actually ran — and stole blind — the country of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and has treated it as a colonial possession since then.

As for Libya, everyone knows the US simply destroyed the country and left it a failed state, mired in internal conflict and virtually ungovernable.

You’re continuing the same process (begun by President Obama) in Syria today, and are doing it by proxy by arming the Saudi Arabian military in its vicious war on Yemen.

How are such places supposed to rise up and modernize themselves? They need our help, not our condescension and mockery.

In fact, maybe your administration’s motto should be “Make the world shittier, and America too.”  You’re already well on the way to succeeding at it.  Hey, you’ve already made it okay for the Washington Post and the NY Times to write “shithole” in their main news articles and even their headlines

Solidarity From Central Cellblock To Guantanamo – OpEd

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On Thursday, January 11, the sixteenth anniversary of the opening of the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba was marked by a coalition of 15 human rights organizations gathered in Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House in Washington, DC. An interfaith prayer service was followed by a rally featuring song and poetry and addresses by activists from the sponsoring organizations, including attorneys for some of those detained at Guantanamo, few of these charged with any crime and some cleared for release years ago. Despite his declaration that “In the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and the detention cells of Guantanamo, we have compromised our most precious values,” President Obama failed to fulfill his promise to close the prison and days before his inauguration last year, Donald Trump tweeted, “There should be no further releases from Gitmo. These are extremely dangerous people and should not be allowed back onto the battlefield.”

I participated in the day’s events as part of the Witness Against Torture community. This was our fourth day of fasting, reflection and action together and many of us wore orange jump suits and black hoods representing the 41 Muslim men still held there. After the rally, WAT performed a simple ritual, serving 41 cups of tea one at a time to “detainees” who each lifted their hood to accept their cup and take a sip before laying it down in a row on the sidewalk. The names of the men were spoken aloud and had been written on each of the styrofoam cups, remembering that drawing and writing on such cups has been one of few outlets for expression for many detainees.

Immediately after the tea was served, five of us, Ken Jones, Manijeh Saba, Helen Schietinger, Beth Adams and I, stepped into Pennsylvania Avenue, walking toward the White House with a banner calling for the release of these 41 along with the thousands imprisoned in immigration detention centers and the millions of victims of hyper-incarceration in the US. To approach the White House, we needed to cross under yellow police line tape and were immediately arrested by uniformed Secret Service police.

I have been attending protests at the White House since Jimmy Carter lived there and with each succeeding administration, the space allowed for political discourse has been reduced and the once protected free speech of citizens increasingly criminalized there. Under Trump, half the width of the formerly public sidewalk in front of the White House is fenced off, the inner perimeter now patrolled by officers armed with automatic weapons. Pennsylvania Avenue, long ago closed to vehicular traffic, is now closed off to pedestrians at the hint of a demonstration. This public forum, a place of protest and advocacy for more than a century, the place where the vote for women and benefits for veterans were won, has been strangled to the point where no dissent is tolerated there.

The five of us were vigorously searched and taken to a local DC Metro Police station where we were photographed, finger printed and charged with “crossing a police line.” My four friends were released from the station after a few hours with a pending court appearance date, as is usual for such petty crimes as ours. I, on the other hand, was transferred by the Secret Service to the Central Cellblock to be brought before a judge the next day.

The booking sergeant told me that if it were up to the Metro Police, I would go home with my friends. The arresting authority, however, was the Secret Service and they wanted me held over due to an apparent outstanding case from Las Vegas. Last April, I was arrested at the armed drone operation center, Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, for the alleged crime of disturbing the peace. The District Attorney in Las Vegas declined to file any charge against me (maybe because I was disturbing the war?) but the chief judge of the Las Vegas Justice (sic) Court summoned me to appear before him on September 25 anyway. I made a motion to the court for clarification and received a response from another judge that I was not required to appear in answer to the summons. I also got official notice from the DA’s office that they had “determined not to file formal charges at this time.” Apparently, the chief judge was not happy with that decision and decided to take the role of prosecutor himself and issued a warrant for my arrest.

Central Cellblock is a crowded, noisy, roach infested hot box where all those arrested and held for various crimes around the city are collected for their initial appearances in court the next day. I was one of more than 90 men who spent the day shunted in chains from cell to cell between the jail and the court. Of these, there was one Latino and a young man from Mauritania, the rest African American. I was the only white man arrested in all of Washington, DC, on January 11 that the authorities chose to keep in jail.

Late Friday afternoon the United States Attorney decided not to press the “crossing a police line” against the five of us and so I was released before coming to court. Had I appeared before a judge, the government would likely have asked the court to hold me over for extradition as a fugitive from justice in Nevada. If this were granted, the Las Vegas authorities would then have had three days to come to DC to fetch me if they cared to.

In our group planning the events of January 11, the question came up about the usefulness of risking arrest for this cause. For myself, beyond strategic benefits, is the issue of solidarity. Just as we fast for a few days as a small gesture of sharing the suffering of the brothers in Guantanamo on hunger strike, so arrest and a few hours in a police station cell can bring us closer to understanding their unjust confinement. My intention was more than realized this time! The suppression of free speech in front of the White House is not the crackdown on the Arab Spring in Bahrain and Central Cellblock is not Abu Ghraib. My would-be extradition to Las Vegas is not “special rendition” to Jordan or to Guantanamo. These evils, small or large, are all growing from the same roots of imperial arrogance and in our different places and conditions, we are in this struggle together.

* Brian Terrell is a co-coordinator for Voices for Creative Nonviolence

Sovereign Wealth Funds: Investment Vehicles Or Political Operators? – Analysis

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The $6.85 billion acquisition in 2006 of Peninsular & Oriental (P&O) Steam Navigation Company, a storied British shipping and logistics company, by Dubai’s state-owned DP World, one the world’s largest port management and terminal operators, sparked fears that governments could employ cash-rich sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) and state-run companies as political muscle.

Twelve years later, with the Middle East fighting multiple battles and external powers jockeying for influence, those fears have proven justified despite the adoption in the wake of the sale of non-binding guidelines for sovereign funds that manage hundreds of billions of dollars.

Concern that an Arab state would post 9/11 gain control of some of the busiest terminals in US ports, including New York, Newark, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Miami, forced DP World to exclude P&O’s American assets from the deal.

The worries prompted the creation of a multilateral international working group chaired by a senior UAE financial official alongside an International Monetary Fund executive that in 2008 adopted the Santiago Principles designed to “ensure that the SWF undertakes investments without any intention or obligation to fulfil, directly or indirectly, any geopolitical agenda of the government.”

Enforcing adherence to the principles has proven easier said than done. With the UAE, whose 1.4 million citizens account for a mere 15 percent of its population of 10 million, projecting itself as a regional military power in the war in Yemen and through the establishment of foreign military bases, DP World has since the US debacle been acquiring ports rights globally, including in countries where the UAE military is active.

To be sure, DP World’s expansion in the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden often makes economic sense and may well have been initially commercially driven in cases like the agreement in 2008 to operate for a period of 30 years the Yemeni port of Aden, once the British empire’s busiest port. The company lost its contract four years later because of its failure to invest in the port.

The port has since taken on even greater geopolitical significance with the UAE military’s focus on Aden and alleged backing for a secessionist movement in southern Yemen in the almost three-year-old Saudi-led military intervention in the country that has allowed DP World to again enter into negotiations about assisting in rebuilding Yemen’s maritime and trade sector that would likely include the company’s return to the Aden port.

DP World’s involvement in Aden tallies in geopolitical terms with its own as well as the UAE’s expansion elsewhere in the Horn of Africa. The company won two years ago a 30-year concession, with an automatic 10-year extension, for the management and development of a multi-purpose deep seaport in Berbera in the breakaway region of Somaliland.

Berbera faces South Yemen across the strategic Bab al Mandab Strait, past which some 4 million barrels of oil flow daily. The UAE military is training Somaliland forces and creating an air and naval facility to protect shipping.

DP World was also developing the port of Bosaso in Puntland, another Somali breakaway region, and was discussing involvement in a third Somali port in Barawe. The Somali ports compliment a UAE military base in Eritrea’s Assab as well as various facilities in Yemen.

“Money and politics make a combustible mix: If you don’t get the formula right, it can blow up in your face,” analysts Adam Ereli and Theodore Karasik warned in a recent Foreign Policy article about the role of sovereign wealth funds in relations between Russia and the Gulf.

In one instance, Kirill Dmitriev, a close associate of President Vladimir Putin and the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), met in early January 2017l in the Seychelles with Blackwater founder Erik Prince, a supporter of President Donald J. Trump and the brother of US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in an effort to create a US-Russian back channel. The meeting, days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, was arranged by UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed.

The meeting occurred as UAE, Saudi and other Gulf sovereign funds as well as DP World earmarked $20 billion for investments in infrastructure, energy, transportation, and military production through RDIF as a way of strengthening relations with Russia. RDIF is one of several Russian entities sanctioned by the US Treasury.

“Even if allowances are made for sectorial and geographic diversification, the level of allocations to these markets is out of proportion to their size and viability,” Messrs. Ereli and Karasik said. In a separate article for The Jamestown Foundation, Mr. Karasik argued that “the Gulf states are using their economic strength to flex their political muscle, in order to invest in Russia at a time when Moscow’s embattled economy is struggling with low oil prices.”

Debate about the political role of sovereign wealth funds subsided with the adoption of the Santiago Principles. Those principles are currently being flaunted in an environment of greater economic nationalism, reduced US emphasis on transparency and democratic values, Russian and Chinese focus on economic benefit, and Gulf governments that have become more assertive in flexing their muscles and asserting themselves internationally.

Gulf sovereign wealth funds have learnt the lessons of DP World’s US experience and are likely to be more cautious in ensuring that potential future investments in the US do not challenge Mr. Trump’s America First principle as well as his emphasis on security. Elsewhere, they operate in an environment in which the Santiago Principles fall by the wayside and governments face little criticism of their use of sovereign wealth funds as geopolitical tools.

Brexit Second Referendum: Will Britain Have A Sudden Change Of Heart? – OpEd

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By Lisdey Espinoza Pedraza

The Brexit referendum results provoked an unprecedented upheaval and political meltdown in the United Kingdom; as a result, in March 2017, the United Kingdom became the first country in history to invoke Article 50 of the Treaty of the European Union and in setting the exit of this organisation in motion. It was only last week, though, that Nigel Farage, of the drivers and strong supporters behind the country’s decision to leave the EU, spoke in favour of holding a second referendum. This is now an entirely new idea, as it is something was first proposed by the Liberal Democrats just days after the results of the June 2016 referendum became public. The difference lies in the motivation to hold this second referendum, while for the Liberal Democrats is to give citizens another chance to stay in the EU, for people like Nigel Farage and the millionaire Aaron Banks the second chance would confirm the support for a clean break with the European organisation.

Is a second referendum even likely to happen? This is a very hard question to answer as it is only the Parliament who can authorise it after a proposal has been put forward by the government itself or by a coalition of opposition parties. This is a highly politicised decision with too much at stake and judging by the political conditions prevalent in the United Kingdom at present, I do not see any politician willing to play this game.

Both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn have ruled out such a possibility as this would mean a breach of trust with the citizens, and the United Kingdom might see itself engulfed in a “neverendum”, first coined by Quebec, where ever since the province has had two referendums to break away from Canada, the campaign for independence has not stopped. Allowing a second referendum in Britain may well reinforce the idea that the establishment will just keep holding referendums until they get the result they want. Therefore, it is highly unlikely Britain political establishment will agree to hold another referendum.

Regardless of what the people feelings on the result are, this was the vote of most of the population in Britain and as such, it deserved to be respected. Attempting to reverse the exit process by calling to a second referendum would further wound the state of democracy in Britain. Democracy is, by definition, the rule of the people, even if the Leave Campaign had been won with just one vote, the results still stand. The victory, however, was carried out with over a million votes, in one of the largest voting turnouts in contemporary British history, and it would be a travesty to disregard such a difference as unimportant. Holding a second referendum would be making a mockery of the democratic exercise and the mandate the people gave their rulers on that day. It would further split the country and weaken Britain’s negotiating stance with the EU as if the result does not change, this would shatter all their hopes for a Soft Brexit deal.

It is also important to remember that there is no evidence whatsoever that supports the notion that if a second referendum is held this year or early next year at the latest, the outcome would be any different. Citizens are becoming more and more sceptical of Brexit talks and of the ability of the establishment to deal successfully with the exit deal, this does not mean, however, that Brexiteers have in any way changed their mind. There was also a very clear age division in the results of the referendum, 75% of the elderly voted to leave, while 75% of the young adults voted to remain. There is no evidence as well that either of these age groups have changed their minds. Therefore, should a second reference even take place, the result may stay the same. Such a division also poses an important dilemma: democracy is the greatest social equaliser in contemporary societies. Placing a weight on someone’s vote that accounts for their age, income level, education, social status, geographical location, etc. will eventually destroy this sense of equality and with it, democracy itself.

The reality is that there is very little support for a second referendum to even be considered seriously by the Parliament. The only ones who has publicly voiced their support for it are the Liberal Democrats, who have nothing to lose since they are only a minor factor in the House of Commons with 12 seats. It is also unclear if such a process could even be reversed. There are two likely scenarios: All EU members would have to agree to Britain’s revocation of the Article 50, although one vote would be enough to veto this process; and secondly, Britain could unilaterally withdraw the Article 50 notification and take its case to the European Court of Justice, both scenarios would take the country and the whole continent into completely unchartered territories.

Overall the one that has been hurt the less has been the EU, while it is true that Brexit has weakened the EU, the panic and shock have been greater than the actual damage. Many predicted several countries following suit and triggering Article 50. However, it had become evident that the lack of planning and complete disarray shown by the British government has served as a crude example to those that in the past were considering leaving the organisation. The disintegration of a political system does not necessarily start with the desire of leaders to do so, but rather with their own mediocrity and inability to pull themselves out from the swamps of their own political waste and mess.

This article was published by Modern Diplomacy

Extremism Has No Place In Political Discourse – OpEd

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The world’s leaders have as of recently begun escalating a war of words with fiery rhetoric – but none of them can claim that they have the ultimate moral authority on everything.

While certain groups like to claim that the “other side” is the harbinger of hatred, evil and discrimination, that “target” almost always has an equally powerful and countervailing viewpoint, backed up by hundreds of millions of people.

The point being that, in this day and age of nuclear cataclysm, the world’s leaders (global and local) no longer have the option of using fiery, divisive rhetoric to justify their political, and constituents’ aims.

While this type of loud nonsense worked well for pre-modern day demagogues like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Kruschev, and others, today in the modern age where 8 billion can communicate in real- time using the internet and social media, it is downright dangerous, misguided and stupid.

There are no more “good guys” and “bad guys,” no more “boogeymen” hiding under the bed, only hundreds of millions of people at polar opposites of the political spectrum who will all die if their elected (and unelected) leaders succeed at irresponsibly baiting the nuclear beast.

Today’s leaders must take stock, and take a step back, and realize that their first and chief order of business should be, not to kill all of their own people.

This means that fiery provocative rhetoric, no matter how angry or indignant or cornered that they feel, simply does not do anything but bring the world closer to nuclear annihilation.

And while certain segments of the global population automatically assume that their constituent base is the “end all, be all” viewpoint as to how the world should work, the fact remains that no one, no race, no religion, no ethnicity, no creed, no political viewpoint has the ultimate solution or answer to the problems facing the world today (if they did, their opponents would not exist today, due to the evolutionary process of natural selection).

The recent world news is rife with political, divisive rhetoric, from all sides of the religious, political, ethnic, racial, and identity politics spectrum, all for their own political benefit.

So while this past week, many of the world’s people were upset with President Donald Trump’s “shithole” comment, other parts of the world’s people were equally upset with Democratic Congressman Luis Gutierrez’ equally idiotic and offensive comment that Trump was some type of “Neo-Nazi” or “KKK” leader.

This type of “tennis-like” analysis can go back, and stretch the lines of time, all around the world, to the earliest days of human existence, with “tit for tat” comments and statements with no better etiology than the “chicken and egg” archetype – which came first, and who started this verbal exchange/diatribe?

Unfortunately since the dawn of time, the world’s most well-funded and political masters of the universe, the global oligarchs, have always used this “us and them” type of dichotomy, using their “useful idiots” strategically placed within governments all around the world, for their own selfish “divide and conquer” strategies, only to further enrich their own pockets and consolidate and strengthen their own power, at the expense of eradicating and exterminating the world’s, and their own, people.

So for minorities to accuse majorities, or majorities to accuse minorities, is both irrelevant and sad, because there are no longer any “minorities” or “majorities” anymore, just interlinked factions all across the globe, each in the hundreds of millions of souls.

To that end, before a leader, any leader, speaks, the first order of business should be: “who is this statement going to offend, and what are the consequences?”

FBI’s Attacks On MLK, Jr. Are Helpful Reminders For Today – OpEd

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By Ryan McMaken*

Writing for the Wall Street Journal in 2005, federal judge and former U.S. deputy attorney general Laurence Silberman recalled how he was “shocked” to discover the extent the FBI abused its power to spy on Americans.

Speaking of the first time he reviewed the files of J. Edgar Hoover, Silberman writes how Hoover tasked “his agents with reporting privately to him on any bits of dirt on figures such as Martin Luther King or their families — information Hoover sometimes used as blackmail to ensure his and the bureau’s power.”

Silberman was writing of having first learned of these abuses of power back in the 1970s. Using a well-worn Hollywood cliché, one might say those days were a “more innocent time.”

Nowadays it is widely known that the FBI was the personal playground of J. Edgar Hoover who employed the agency to punish his political enemies and gain compliance from others.

In spite of its claims, though, the FBI has never moved terribly far from its days as Hoover’s praetorian guard.

Tellingly, the FBI still refuses to remove Hoover’s name from its headquarters in Washington, and the agency’s habit of routinely violating the privacy of American citizens is now institutionalized, rather than the product of any single man’s crusade.

Both James Bovard and Timothy Weiner have documented in many ways the FBI legacy of using its power to destroy political threats to its power, and to do so in extra-legal ways whenever deemed “necessary.”

Today, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, offers an opportunity to focus on some of the methods employed by the FBI. As The Daily Caller reports today:

In addition to tapping King’s phones and bugging his hotel rooms, the FBI used darker methods to attack the civil rights leader.

[The FBI] sent to King’s home a “suicide package” in 1964 that contained audio recordings of King’s extramarital trysts and an unsigned letter telling him “there is only one way out for you.” The letter, which was published in un-redacted form by The New York Times in 2014, threatened to make the recordings public unless King offed himself within 34 days.

“King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days,” the letter stated. “There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

(The charges of “filthy” and “abnormal” are especially cute given the unorthodox sexual activities of Hoover and then-president Lyndon Johnson.)

Paranoia at the FBI

King was just one of many targets of “COINTELPRO,” a series of often-illegal operations employed by the bureau to harass and persecute the federal government’s political enemies.

COINTELPRO, however, was just the manifestation of FBI paranoia in that specific era. The exact nature of the motivation changes over time. In the late ‘teens, the Palmer raids were employed to go after suspected Bolsheviks and “anarchists” in an extra-legal fashion.

In the 1920s, the FBI was spying on US Senators who were deemed insufficiently loyal to the US regime. Weiner explains:

By the time Congress reconvened in March 1923, [Attorney General Harry] Daugherty and [William J.] Burns were conducting political espionage against senators whom the attorney general saw as threats to America. The bureau was breaking into their offices and homes, intercepting their mail, and tapping their telephones, just as it had done to members of the Communist party. The only rationale was the political movement in the Senate toward American diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia.

After all, Weiner notes how in the early 20s, “Hoover and his General Intelligence Division warned constantly of a violent communist revolution.” Hoover happily used the paranoia he produced to increase his own political power.

40 years later, the FBI was still at it, this time tapping King’s phone’s an an attempt to get him to kill himself.1

Today, though, the FBI and other American intelligence agencies are attempting to legalize what was once considered illegal, or at least of questionable legality.

What the FBI wants today are modern equivalents of Dan Brookman calls “modern-day writes of assistance” or blank-check warrants that enable federal agents to simply gather every bit of private information they can on private citizens.

As Judge Napolitano explains, the federal government is moving toward expanding the use of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants to enable agencies like the FBI to more easily use surveillance data against Americans:

If enacted, this radical, unconstitutional hole in the Fourth Amendment would bring the country full circle back to the government’s use of general warrants to harass and prosecute — general warrants so odious to our forebears that they took up arms against the king’s soldiers to be rid of them.

Many Americans today like to comfort themselves with the idea that “I’m not involved in any threats to national security” or “I don’t associate with terrorists” and then think themselves immune from government abuses.

But Martin Luther King didn’t present any threat to national security either. He didn’t call for violent acts to be perpetrated against the American state. He was, however, a political thorn in the side of powerful Washington politicians, so the federal government turned to some of the things they do best. It turned to persecuting, threatening, and spying, in the hopes of doing away with an inconvenient person.

King’s experience (and the COINTELPRO experience in general) today remain a healthy reminder of how the federal government operates and just how little regard it has for the law. One can only imagine how flimsy will be the limits imposed on FBI and other federal agencies should the current attacks on the Fourth Amendment succeed.

About the author:
*Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is the editor of Mises Wire and The Austrian. Send him your article submissions, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

Source:
This article was published by the MISES Institute

Notes:
1. Paranoia still reigned in the late 1970s when FBI agents convinced themselves — or at least tried to convince the public — that every less-than-happy group in America was a potential incubator of violent revolutionaries. One notable example is the propaganda war against the American Indian Movement. AIM was a small, rural movement designed largely to fight against federal meddling in Indian reservations. Paid FBI informants like Douglass Durham, an FBI provocateur working inside AIM, put forward the narrative that AIM members were plotting the violent overthrow of the American government.  In The Encyclopedia of the American Indian Movement, Bruce E. Johansen writes: “After he was discovered and dismissed from AIM, Durham developed an extensive anti-AIM campaign. He went on the road with a lecture tour sponsored by the arch-conservative John Birch Society, branding AIM members as gun-toting communist terrorists. He also testified in similar character before the US Congress. In 1976, Durham created wholly fictional memos describing a fake band of AIM revolutionaries call the ‘Dog Soldiers.’ The FBI distributed these ‘teletypes’ nationally and watched as they were broadcast on the CBS, NBC, and ABC evening news. Later, FBI director Clarence Kelly admitted that the tale of the ‘Dog Soldiers’ was entirely fictitious.”

Beyond Modi-Bibi Bonhomie: Limits Of Indian-Israeli Convergence – Analysis

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By Manoj Joshi

In the Modi era, India-Israel relations exist in two planes. The first is the normal one of friendly relations between two states who have had normal diplomatic relations since 1992 and, from India’s point of view, have a strategic dimension based on Israel’s capacities in the area of technology.

The second is visible through the prism of BJP/RSS’s adulation for the Jewish state because of its achievement in not only recovering the purity of its ancient civilisation in the face of alleged Islamic hostility, but vigorously defending it with its military might thereafter.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be in New Delhi this week in return for Modi’s 2017 visit, the first ever by an Indian Prime Minister. It will be another occasion to see how these two planes intersect.

Bonhomie Between Modi and ‘Bibi’

We are likely to see enhanced movement in a range of areas such as military-technical trade and cooperation, agriculture, water technology, renewable energy, healthcare and cyber security. At the same time, no doubt, there will also be gestures by the government to signal its special feelings for Israel.

Modi’s July 2017 visit was an event in itself. He pointedly avoided visiting Ramallah, the capital of Palestine in the same tour, and paid homage at the tomb of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. There was easy informality between Netanyahu and him as they strolled on the beach. Modi addressed his Israeli counterpart by his nickname “Bibi”, and there were numerous trademark ‘Modi hugs’.

Early enough Netanyahu, not the most popular man in the world, sensed the opportunity that Modi and the BJP’s uncritical admiration provided his country. He was the first to congratulate Modi on his election as Prime Minister in 2014. Subsequently, high level exchanges between the two countries intensified with mutual visits of their respective Presidents and ministers, Modi’s Israel-visit in 2017 and now Netanyahu’s visit to India.

Ties with Israel Since the 1950s

India has had important and pragmatic ties with Israel since the 1950s. In the 1970s, the Israelis reportedly gave a leg-up to India’s nuclear weapons programme through the important RAW and Mossad relationship. In the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, Israeli experts advised India on setting up VIP security.

In the 1990s, Israel became a means through which technologies, which the US denied to us, could come through. This became important for Tel Aviv after the US embargoed certain kinds of technologies to China.

The direct benefit was India’s AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) which has been built with Israeli electronics on a Russian airframe. Israel also gave a boost to the Indian Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) programme by agreeing to supply its Green Pine radar.

Israeli assistance during the Kargil War of 1999 has helped shape the relationship of today, which sees Israeli Searcher and Heron drones, Barak surface-to-air missiles, and AWACS aircraft in the Indian armoury.

In addition, Israel provided unspecified sensor technology for India’s border fence on the Line of Control with Pakistan. Perhaps the most ambitious project currently underway is $2 billion medium and long range surface-to-air missile system, jointly developed by several Israeli companies and the DRDO. Equally important in the mid-2000s, it provided India with RISAT-2, its first radar imaging satellite.

India Offers Economic Opportunity But Security Dimension is Different

The positive trajectory of relations between the two countries had been set well before Modi and Netanyahu became Prime Ministers. Even so, having a government of a party which has an almost fawning attitude towards Israel is a big plus, especially since that country is a respected member of the Non Aligned Movement. Equally important is the opportunity that an economically flourishing India provides for Israeli companies.

Of course, India stands to benefit a great deal from Israel, whether it is in the area of technology, or in creating an eco-system that encourages technology development, whether it is for the civilian sector or the military. But we should not overstate the security dimension.

The security scenarios of the two countries could not be more different. Israel cannot afford any major military or terrorist setback on its territory, whereas India can absorb a lot. Many Indians, especially those close to the BJP, admire Israel’s tough military posture which involves periodic cross-border strikes against its enemies. Israel can carry out those strikes because it has total air superiority against its non-state actor adversaries. Unlike Israel, our terrorists are backed by a nuclear weapons state.

Limits of Indian-Israeli Convergence

But is Israel safer, despite its repeated invasions and attacks in Gaza and Lebanon? Where India has managed to successfully eliminate Khalistani terrorism and contain its Islamist variety, successive Israeli military operations have ended up with its enemies becoming more dangerous.

Israel’s problem is not Islamist extremism per se, but a people whose land it is militarily occupying. Israel sees no contradiction in achieving Jewish nationality in Palestine by depriving the Muslim and Christian Palestinians of their nationhood. This may have a resonance with some Hindutva forces, who would not mind marginalising and dis-empowering Muslim citizens of the country, but is not acceptable to the world.

This was evident in the recent UN resolution criticising the US decision to name Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and calling for an end to its military occupation of Palestinian territories. India’s support for the resolution indicated the limits to the Indian-Israeli convergence. This is but natural – the two countries do not have an identity of interests. Israel may be a nuclear power, but its real influence lies through its ties with the US.

India Has to Tread Carefully

A larger part of India is also friendly to the US, but it has a more complex regional agenda, which involves a difficult US friend, Pakistan, and balancing relations between Tel Aviv, Teheran and Riyadh. Trump can do the sword dance in Riyadh and recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, but India has to step carefully in a region where it has vital interests. And hence Modi’s return to the region, probably next month, to visit UAE, Palestine and Jordan.

There is little doubt that in terms of its economic achievements and military power, Israel flies high in its region.

But the real existential challenge is in making a soft landing. Either it agrees to the two-state solution mooted by most countries, or it becomes travesty of a democracy which keeps millions of people in captivity, a prospect guaranteed to generate perpetual insecurity.

This article originally appeared in thequint


Egypt Versus The New York Times – OpEd

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The full repercussions of US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital have yet to be felt. One rather strange little by-product does not seem to have grabbed the world’s attention as yet. It is a story capable of a number of interpretations, not all of them complimentary to the principal players.

The facts are these. On January 6, 2018 the New York Times published an exclusive news item based on four audio recordings that it said it had obtained. The Times report did not vouchsafe precisely how they had come into its possession.

These recordings, it said, took place shortly after Trump had startled the world by announcing that the US recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and would move its embassy there from Tel Aviv. They were, it said, recordings of telephone conversations between an officer in Egypt’s Intelligence Service, Captain Ashraf al-Kholi, and four very well-known Egyptian media personalities, three of them hosts of influential talk shows. The TV hosts were Azmy Megahed, Mofid Fawzy, and Saeed Hassaseen. The fourth person contacted by al-Kholi was Egyptian movie star Yousra.

Captain al-Kholi told the four people he phoned that Egypt, “like all our Arab brothers,” would denounce Trump’s decision in public, but that conflict with Israel was not in Egypt’s national interest. He suggested that instead of condemning Trump’s decision, these media personalities should persuade their viewers to accept it. In its report, the New York Times included the interesting information that TV chat show host Azmi Megahed had confirmed the authenticity of the recordings, and had described al-KhoIi as a longtime acquaintance.

The Times article, which was immediately published on-line, raised a torrent of furious commentary in Egypt’s pro-government media and in parliament, where it was denounced as part of an international conspiracy to embarrass Egypt. This accusation was partly confirmed when the very same audio recordings were broadcast by an Istanbul-based television network linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. The suggestion of a connection with the Brotherhood, which Egypt has banned as a terrorist group, added to the outrage from supporters of the Egyptian government.

Once in the public domain, an allegation that Egyptian intelligence had secretly attempted to sway public opinion in favor of accepting Trump’s decision on Jerusalem could not go unanswered. Four days later Egypt’s prosecutor general, Nabil Sadek. ordered a criminal investigation. The New York Times article, he maintained, “undermines Egypt’s security and public peace, and harms the country’s public interest.”

The next developments were as one might have expected. Egypt’s State Information Service (SIS) released a statement denying the accuracy of the Times report on almost every count. No one named Ashraf al-Kholi, it maintained, worked for the intelligence service. Fawzi had not presented any TV programmes for years, and Hassaseen’s show had ended weeks before Trump’s declaration, and he was not currently presenting any program on air. As for Yousra, SIS said that she was a movie actress totally unconnected with TV talk shows.

Much of this may be true, but it has little relevance to the high profile enjoyed by those particular individuals among the Egyptian public. And it seems clear that SIS, and perhaps other organs of the state, subsequently subjected them to intense political pressure. It was not long before Megahed publicly retracted his original statement authenticating the recordings and claiming that he was an old acquaintance of Kholi. In an Egyptian television interview Megahed said that the New York Times had misquoted him. “This is the first time I’ve heard of this Kholi man,” he said.

Next, actress Yousra and the other TV anchors denied knowing anyone named al-Kholi or participating in telephone conversations with him. Yousra claimed not to have been in Egypt at the time they were reported to have taken place. The clear implication is that the recordings were faked. Not unsurprisingly, conspiracy theories followed. Pro-government television anchors called on the Times to explain how the recordings ended up with the Brotherhood-affiliated TV channel, and suggested that the newspaper was secretly in cahoots with Qatar. Egypt is one of four Arab nations that imposed a punishing boycott on Qatar last June, accusing it of financing Islamist terrorism and sheltering Brotherhood leaders.

The speaker of Parliament, Ali Abdel Aal, went along with this, and said the article proved that the Times was allied with the Brotherhood and with Qatar, and was stoking controversy in advance of Egypt’s forthcoming presidential elections. Finally all the SIS could do was issue a statement asserting that Egypt had repeatedly declared its “inalienable position on Jerusalem,” side-stepping the fact that, in doing so, it was confirming what al-Kholi had said would be the official stance.

A stout riposte was provided by Michael Slackman, the Times’s international editor. “Our story was a deeply reported, consequential piece of journalism,” he said, “and we stand fully behind it. The audio recordings were provided to the Times by an intermediary supportive of the Palestinian cause, but we had no agenda other than giving our readers the facts they needed to know.”

This whole episode, true or false, comes at a delicate time for Egypt politically. The first round of new presidential elections is scheduled for March 26. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who is running for re-election, faces only a weak rival, since his principal challenger, former prime minister Ahmed Shafik, pulled out of the race (Shafik’s lawyers claimed that officials had pressed him to quit on the threat of corruption prosecutions). All the same, the Egyptian public is unlikely to look kindly on a government-inspired endorsement – even a covert one – of Trump’s Jerusalem declaration. The last thing Sisi wants, come March, is a poor turnout in his presidential poll. The result of the prosecutor general’s criminal investigation into the New York Times report is bound to make interesting reading.

Saudi Arabia Intercepts Ballistic Missile Launched By Houthis In Yemen

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Saudi air defense forces announced on Tuesday that they intercepted a ballistic missile, launched by Yemen’s Houthi militias, over Jazan at around 8:20 p.m.

It comes after Saudi forces intercepted another ballistic missile fired by the Houthis over the southern province of Najran, bordering Yemen last week.

Meanwhile, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir said Tuesday that Iran was the biggest source of danger in the region because of its role in Lebanon, Yemen and Syria.

Iran supplied the Houthi militias with missiles that targeted Saudi Arabia, he told the media alongside his Belgian counterpart Didier Renders at a press conference in the Belgian capital, Brussels.

“The nuclear deal with Iran needs improvement to prevent Tehran from enriching uranium,” Al-Jubeir added.

Commenting on Al-Jubeir’s statement, Renders said: “the nuclear agreement with Iran is still optimal and its implementation is important,” adding that “we will discuss with Iran the issue of ballistic missiles and wars in the region.”

A UN experts’ report seen by AFP said on Jan. 12 that Iran has violated a UN arms embargo by failing to block supplies to the Houthis of ballistic missiles that were fired at Saudi Arabia.

Romania: Ruling Party Nominates Woman As PM

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By Ana Maria Luca

Romania’s ruling Social Democrat Party nominated Viorica Dancila to replace Mihai Tudose as prime minister after the latter was dismissed on Monday.

Romania’s Social Democrats nominated on Tuesday MEP Viorica Dancila, known for her women’s rights initiatives in the European Parliament, to replace Prime Minister Mihai Tudose who resigned on Monday after the ruling party withdrew its political backing.

Dancila has been a MEP since 2009, is a member of the Social Democrat party since 1996 and is currently the head of the Social Democrat Women’s organization. She was nominated in 2017 for the European Parliament’s award for defending women’s rights.

She is the second woman the Social Democrats nominate as prime minister, after Sevil Shhaideh, a Muslim, was rejected by President Klaus Iohannis in January 2017.

Romania’s ruling Social Democrat Party on Tuesday nominated MEP Viorica Dancila to head the country’s third cabinet since they won parliamentary elections in December 2017.

Romania’s ruling party has dismissed two governments in the past seven months.

Prime Minister Mihai Tudose resigned on Monday night, after the Social Democrat leaders voted for his ouster. Tudose has been in conflict with the party leadership over his intention to reshuffle the cabinet and fire some of the minister who did not perform well.

“The general conclusion was that there was a toxic atmosphere between the cabinet and the ruling party as well as inside the cabinet,” Social Democrats Party leader Liviu Dragnea explained on Monday night.

Tudose’s resignation came just as Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe arrived in Bucharest for the first- ever official visit by a Japanese head of state to Romania.

Romania’s government had to put protocol aside and Abe, who was accompanied by a delegation of 30 businesspeople, was welcomed at the airport by two state secretaries from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Japanese delegation cancelled Abe’s meetings with government officials and only met Iohannis.

The collapse of two Social Democrat-led governments is becoming worrisome, Iohannis said during a press conference.

Iohannis asked all of the country’s political parties to hold consultations on Wednesday for “an expedited procedure to name a new prime minister.”

Romania has been in constant political turmoil since the center-left Social Democrat Party won legislative elections in December 2016.

Romanians took to the streets in January-February 2017 to show their disapproval with the government’s push for judicial reform that was deemed threatening to the independence of the courts.

Hubble Weighs In On Mass Of 3 Million Billion Suns

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In 2014, astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope found that this enormous galaxy cluster contains the mass of a staggering three million billion suns — so it’s little wonder that it has earned the nickname of “El Gordo” (“the Fat One” in Spanish)! Known officially as ACT-CLJ0102-4915, it is the largest, hottest, and brightest X-ray galaxy cluster ever discovered in the distant Universe.

Galaxy clusters are the largest objects in the Universe that are bound together by gravity. They form over billions of years as smaller groups of galaxies slowly come together. In 2012, observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope showed that El Gordo is actually composed of two galaxy clusters colliding at millions of kilometers per hour.

The formation of galaxy clusters depends heavily on dark matter and dark energy; studying such clusters can therefore help shed light on these elusive phenomena. In 2014, Hubble found that most of El Gordo’s mass is concealed in the form of dark matter. Evidence suggests that El Gordo’s “normal” matter — largely composed of hot gas that is bright in the X-ray wavelength domain — is being torn from the dark matter in the collision. The hot gas is slowing down, while the dark matter is not.

This image was taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide-Field Camera 3 as part of an observing program called RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey). RELICS imaged 41 massive galaxy clusters with the aim of finding the brightest distant galaxies for the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope to study.

Ancient DNA Results End 4,000-Year-Old Egyptian Mummy Mystery

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Using ‘next generation’ DNA sequencing scientists have found that the famous ‘Two Brothers’ mummies of the Manchester Museum have different fathers so are, in fact, half-brothers.

The Two Brothers are the Museum’s oldest mummies and amongst the best-known human remains in its Egyptology collection. They are the mummies of two elite men – Khnum-nakht and Nakht-ankh – dating to around 1800 BC.

However, ever since their discovery in 1907 there has been some debate amongst Egyptologists whether the two were actually related at all. So, in 2015, ‘ancient DNA’ was extracted from their teeth to solve the mystery.

But how did the mystery start? The pair’s joint burial site, later dubbed The Tomb of The Two Brothers, was discovered at Deir Rifeh, a village 250 miles south of Cairo.

They were found by Egyptian workmen directed by early 20th century Egyptologists, Flinders Petrie and Ernest Mackay. Hieroglyphic inscriptions on the coffins indicated that both men were the sons of an unnamed local governor and had mothers with the same name, Khnum-aa. It was then the men became known as the Two Brothers.

When the complete contents of the tomb were shipped to Manchester in 1908 and the mummies of both men were unwrapped by the UK’s first professional female Egyptologist, Dr Margaret Murray. Her team concluded that the skeletal morphologies were quite different, suggesting an absence of family relationship. Based on contemporary inscriptional evidence, it was proposed that one of the Brothers was adopted.

Therefore, in 2015, the DNA was extracted from the teeth and, following hybridization capture of the mitochondrial and Y chromosome fractions, sequenced by a next generation method. Analysis showed that both Nakht-Ankh and Khnum-Nakht belonged to mitochondrial haplotype M1a1, suggesting a maternal relationship. The Y chromosome sequences were less complete but showed variations between the two mummies, indicating that Nakht-Ankh and Khnum-Nakht had different fathers, and were thus very likely to have been half-brothers.

Dr Konstantina Drosou, of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Manchester who conducted the DNA sequencing, said: “It was a long and exhausting journey to the results but we are finally here. I am very grateful we were able to add a small but very important piece to the big history puzzle and I am sure the brothers would be very proud of us. These moments are what make us believe in ancient DNA. ”

The study, which is being published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, is the first to successfully use the typing of both mitochondrial and Y chromosomal DNA in Egyptian mummies.

Dr Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum, said: “The University of Manchester, and Manchester Museum in particular, has a long history of research on ancient Egyptian human remains. Our reconstructions will always be speculative to some extent but to be able to link these two men in this way is an exciting first.”

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