By Syed Zain Jaffery

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in his 2018 New Year’s address proudly declared, “The entire mainland of the US is within the range of our nuclear weapons and the nuclear button is always on the desk of my office”. The US president Trump immediately took to the twitter, his favorite medium of conversation, to hit back at Pyongyang’s nuclear threat, saying that his button is “much bigger” and more powerful than Kim’s. With nukes between 25 and 60, as per U.S. intelligence assessments, North Korea poses major security threat for the US mainland and its allies in Europe. Despite severe economic sanctions, one wonders, how North Korean scientists learned sophistication in Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) capabilities?

A UN Panel of Experts (UN PoE) report revealed that, number of North Korean Scientists who are part of Pyongyang’s nuclear program,studied courses on space science and satellite technology at a research institute, Centre for Space Science and Technology Education in Asia and the Pacific (CSSTEAP), in northern India. According to the UN report, between 1995 and 2016, 30 North Korean students have studied courses on space science and satellite technology at a research institute, Centre for Space Science and Technology Education in Asia and the Pacific (CSSTEAP), in northern India.

CSSTEAP, which is located in Dehradun, capital city of the state of Uttarakhand, offers extensive courses on Satellite Communications, Space & Atmospheric Science, Global Navigation Satellite Systems and many other disciplines related to space exploration. The Centre is hosted by the Government of India with the Department of Space (DOS), as the nodal agency. In an interview to Al Jazeera, Hong Yong-il, who studied at CSSTEAP,now Korean embassy’s new first secretary to India, praised center for informative courses. Interestingly UN Panel of Experts(PoE) report notes that “(Participation) in the space and atmospheric science and global navigation satellite systems courses is a ballistic missile-related activity prohibited under the resolutions”.

A UN PoE report clearly indicates that New Delhi has violated UN Security Council’s unanimously adopted resolution 1718 (2006), which prohibited the provision of large-scale arms, nuclear technology and related training to the North Korea.

It is an open secret that India shares an unholy nuclear connection with North Koreaand quite surprisingly this is a lost debate in mainstream scholarship on nuclear crisis in Korean Peninsula. India’s facilitation of Korean students still remains a mystery despite UN PoE repots and subsequent investigative report by Al Jazeera titled as “India’s embarrassing North Korean connection, in June 2016.

India rejected Al Jazeera’s report calling it ‘baseless and without any merit.’The Indian ministry of external affairs stated “the report is subjective and based on the limited understanding of the experts who have authored it. India has made its position clear in this regard to the UN Security Council. The topics covered in the courses offered by CSSTEAP are very general and cover basic principles in the respective areas,” But when UN officials raised objections on courses offering satellite communications training and instructions for launch vehicle testing to North Koreans”, India stopped accepting North Korean students. It means, the courses offered to North Koreans were not that simple as India claimed. Once exposed by the UN PoE, India’s immediate rejection to North Korean students also substantiate UN official’s concerns.

Subsequent events clearly suggest that India is not clean regarding its nuclear connection with Pyongyang. Paek Chong-ho, who studied satellite communications training and instructions for launch vehicle testing at CSSTEAP, was appointed at a senior post in the agency governing North Korea’s 2012 satellite launch. In addition to that, Paek, another CSSTEAP alumnus, is now a senior official at a scientific research agency. All these evidences by UN officials report not just remove mysterious clouds from New Delhi’s clandestine relations with Pyongyang but also put a question mark on India’s nuclear nonproliferation commitments.

India helped and trained North Korean students and it has been acknowledged by various experts focusing North Korea’s nuclear affairs. Bruce Bechtol, president of the International Council on Korean Studies in an email conversation stated that the courses offered to North Korean students at CSSTEAP may very well have helped Pyongyang’s military programmes,”

In Another violation of UN sanctions, North Korea illegally exported coal, iron and other commodities worth $270 million to India and some other countries. According to the UN experts, between October 2016 and May 2017, North Korea exported iron and steel products valued at $305,713 to India and many other countries. Additionally, India also imported silver, copper, zinc, nickel and gold from the DPRK which is violation of UNSC sanction. This clandestine import-export relationship between India and North Korea enabled later to sustain a costly nuclear program.

But more worrisomely, last year, a cybersecurity firm, Recorded Future, found intense North Korean internet activity in India where nearly one-fifth of North Korea’s cyberattacks originate. Even, researchers believe that hackers from North Korea are physically stationed in India and consistently hacking US and other European cites.

It is an open secret that, for several years, after UNSC sanctions, India and North Korea have maintained a strong trading partnership. Quite surprisingly, when UNSC sanctioned North Korea, the trade volume between both countries, barely $100 in mid of 2000 suddenly shoot up to the $1 billion in 2009. The trade which overwhelmingly favors India makes it second largest trade partner to North Korea. That means, in return to nuclear cooperation, there is an economic incentive for India. That’s why India calls its relationship with North Korea as relationship of ‘friendship, cooperation, and understanding.

However, it’s extremely important for international community to seek investigations into India’s nuclear linkages with North Korea. Through a comprehensive investigation process, those who are responsible can be held accountable for extending nuclear assistance to a rogue state which pose a greater security risk for entire world.

Source: This article was published by Modern Diplomacy

A novel 3D printing method, called “rotational 3D printing,” yields unprecedented control of the arrangement of short fibers embedded in polymer matrices. Researchers used additive manufacturing technique to program fiber orientation within epoxy composites in specified locations, enabling the creation of structural materials that are optimized for strength, stiffness, and damage tolerance

Nature has produced exquisite composite materials–wood, bone, teeth, and shells, for example–that combine light weight and density with desirable mechanical properties such as stiffness, strength and damage tolerance.

Since ancient civilizations first combined straw and mud to form bricks, people have fabricated engineered composites of increasing performance and complexity. But reproducing the exceptional mechanical properties and complex microstructures found in nature has been challenging.

Now, a team of researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has demonstrated a novel 3D printing method that yields unprecedented control of the arrangement of short fibers embedded in polymer matrices. They used this additive manufacturing technique to program fiber orientation within epoxy composites in specified locations, enabling the creation of structural materials that are optimized for strength, stiffness, and damage tolerance.

Their method, referred to as “rotational 3D printing,” could have broad ranging applications. Given the modular nature of their ink designs, many different filler and matrix combinations can be implemented to tailor electrical, optical, or thermal properties of the printed objects.

“Being able to locally control fiber orientation within engineered composites has been a grand challenge,” said the study’s senior author, Jennifer A. Lewis, Hansjorg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard SEAS. “We can now pattern materials in a hierarchical manner, akin to the way that nature builds.” Lewis is also a Core Faculty Member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

The work, described in the journal PNAS, was carried out in the Lewis lab at Harvard. Collaborators included then-postdoctoral fellows Brett Compton (now Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville), and Jordan Raney (now Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania); and visiting PhD student Jochen Mueller from Prof. Kristina Shea’s lab at ETH Zurich.

The key to their approach is to precisely choreograph the speed and rotation of a 3D printer nozzle to program the arrangement of embedded fibers in polymer matrices. This is achieved by equipping a rotational printhead system with a stepper motor to guide the angular velocity of the rotating nozzle as the ink is extruded.

“Rotational 3D printing can be used to achieve optimal, or near optimal, fiber arrangements at every location in the printed part, resulting in higher strength and stiffness with less material,” Compton said. “Rather than using magnetic or electric fields to orient fibers, we control the flow of the viscous ink itself to impart the desired fiber orientation.”

Compton noted that the team’s nozzle concept could be used on any material extrusion printing method, from fused filament fabrication, to direct ink writing, to large-scale thermoplastic additive manufacturing, and with any filler material, from carbon and glass fibers to metallic or ceramic whiskers and platelets.

The technique allows for the 3D printing of engineered materials that can be spatially programmed to achieve specific performance goals. For example, the orientation of the fibers can be locally optimized to increase the damage tolerance at locations that would be expected to undergo the highest stress during loading, hardening potential failure points.

“One of the exciting things about this work is that it offers a new avenue to produce complex microstructures, and to controllably vary the microstructure from region to region,” Raney said. “More control over structure means more control over the resulting properties, which vastly expands the design space that can be exploited to optimize properties further.”

“Biological composite materials often have remarkable mechanical properties: high stiffness and strength per unit weight and high toughness. One of the outstanding challenges of designing engineering materials inspired by biological composites is control of fiber orientation at small length scales and at the local level,” said Lorna J. Gibson, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, who was not involved in the research. “This remarkable paper from the Lewis group demonstrates a way of doing just that. This represents a huge leap forward in the design of bio-inspired composites.”

By Holly Ashe and Paula Wright*

We, and many other women, are concerned about their neurodiverse loved ones being falsely accused.

With the recent magnitude of sexual harassment claims being thrown about from every corner of the media, and ruined careers piling up like carcasses, often from unproven accusations, every man must now be questioning their own past behavior, fearing it will be misconstrued into some harrowing sexual predation that would affect every aspect of their life without evidence, a trial, or a jury.

The suicide of Welsh MP Karl Sargeant four days after such nebulous accusations unnamed women has been shamefully swept under the carpet as the #MeToo frenzy continues. Calls for an internal enquiry into the clearly deficient process he went through, where he was suspended from his job without knowing the details of the complaint, have been dropped. We can only hope Mr Sargeant and his family get the answers and the justice they deserve via the official coroner’s inquest. The tragedy of Karl Sargeant is the most extreme example of the incredible injustice many men –not forgetting their families- are going though as a result of this appalling witch hunt and trial by media.

All of us know people in our life—family members and friends—who are otherwise smart, witty, empathetic, but socially awkward, either for cultural or neurological reasons like autism spectrum disorders (ASD) or just as part of their personality. They struggle to read body language, situations or atmospheres, let alone female mind games. Men, who walk a tightrope of social acceptance already, now stepping into a world where feminists want men deemed as second-class citizens, to be distrusted and their social interactions scrutinized at every second.

It’s already difficult for ASD people to form social relationships to start with, as psychologist Kirsty Kerr states (pdf), and there are numerous traits of ASD that could impact on forming social and romantic relationships. When to initiate a first kiss on a date is a fraught endeavor even for neurotypicals; for the neurodiverse, its petrifying. The human tendency for reading false positives in others behaviors is a well-studied and robust finding. We are all, neurodiverse and neurotypical, vulnerable to misinterpreting another’s intentions. For those on the spectrum, falling foul of complex social etiquette is not a risk, it’s a guaranteed surety. Misunderstandings will happen which will land them in hot water, without an inkling of intention or awareness. Even though we are all at some point made to undergo equality and diversity training, to learn the considerations of people’s culture, religion, sexuality and disability, considerations of neurodiversity are never made aware. So, we treat people on the spectrum the same as neurotypical people, expecting them to transcend their difficulties in order to fit into an ever-narrowing realm of acceptable behavior.

Adults on the spectrum have already ran the gamut of school, an experience which leaves many scarred and only too happy to move on. They find solace after school by working in areas that are often technical and geeky. Fields in which feminists are now trying to invade with aims to change the “toxic” culture. Except it’s not toxic. People on the spectrum often self-isolate, despite them desperately wanting to have more intimacy. The constant humiliation and bitter lessons learned at school can make loneliness a more preferable and manageable trade off. For those who do not choose loneliness, those brave enough to learn social skills via trial and error, imagine the shattering of their already fragile confidence when they inevitably fall foul of a feminist trap.

People on the autism spectrum vary. There are those who experience an excess of empathy, sensitivity and are brimming with compassion and love, which people wrongly don’t associate with when they think of ASD. Those with high functioning autism do not have learning or cognitive difficulties but social difficulties. They very often have high IQ’s. But despite them looking “normal” on the outside, they are still vulnerable. Such people are already highly vulnerable to office politics and an attack like this because of an unproven story, and the woman not communicating properly, and being hyped up on fourth wave feminism, will destroy vulnerable lives.

Winking or flirting, things otherwise considered ‘banter’, can land one in life destroying savagery. Men are not protesting this madness, partly because it is their innate chivalry which stops them from arguing with women, a unique unequal advantage; or partly, they like most others, just want to avoid further trouble of being marked as sexist bigots. In light of that, it is the duty of women of principle to protect the men we care about, our relatives and loved ones, from this mindless, perverse, gender war. The documented evidence that feminism is not a movement for sexual and gender equality is overwhelming today. Feminism is a movement to dismantle “patriarchy”, a nebulous conspiracy theory which feminists (of both sexes and all genders) like to invoke when they are out of actual evidence. Campaigns like #MeToo, and extreme ideologies like those espoused by Everyday Sexism, are tools towards this dubious goal. The presumption of innocence is not a patriarchal tyranny, it is a fundamental liberal principle which we all need to fight to protect.

*About the Authors:
Holly Ashe: Holly is a London based fashion and culture writer, and a columnist for Bombs + Dollars. She was previously published in Vogue International as a fashion designer and a start-up business entrepreneur. Her previous fashion publications can be found here. You can follow her on Twitter @hollyroseashe.

Paula Wright: Paula is a researcher in evolutionary anthropology. She is the founder of Darwinian Gender Studies, an interdisciplinary research area which encompasses evidence based gender studies, anthropology, and psychology, among others. She has a special interest in female intra-sexual competition. Her articles have appeared in Psychology Today, The Telegraph, and Bombs + Dollars. Follow her on Twitter @SexyIsntSexist.

Source:
This article was published by Bombs and Dollars

By Mariela Jara

The political crisis triggered in Peru by the presidential pardon of former president Alberto Fujimori granted on Christmas Eve casts a shadow of doubt over what actions will be taken to curb violence against women in this country, where 116 femicides were registered in 2017, and which ranks eighth with respect to gender-related murders in Latin America and the Caribbean.

“The pardon devalues the actions that the government may undertake to achieve a life without violence, because it has released one of the worst violators of the human rights of women,” said Liz Meléndez, director of the non-governmental Flora Tristán Women’s Centre.

Meléndez pointed out that in the 1990s, Fujimori was responsible for a public policy that forcibly sterilised more than 200,000 Andean indigenous peasant women, a crime for which he will not be investigated or penalised since he was granted a presidential pardon.

“This impunity is outrageous,” she said, since due to problems of access to justice, poverty and discrimination, it was only possible to put together a file of 2,074 cases.

The distrust towards the government’s actions was accentuated by the official designation of 2018 as the year of Dialogue and Reconciliation, a phrase coined by current President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski to justify the pardon granted to the ex-convict, sentenced for corruption and human rights violations.

It rankled even more given that Decade of Equal Opportunities for Women and Men is beginning.

“The declaration of the Decade warns us that the gender focus will continue to be undermined, as happened throughout 2017, by the pressure of conservative groups, whose representatives are likely to be part of the next new cabinet; and we are worried that there may be setbacks in the fight against violence against women, despite the advances in legislation and regulations,” said Meléndez.

Peru is in fact, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and UN Women, one of the countries in the region with laws, plans and public policies against gender violence, specific legislation against femicide (gender-related murders), and new laws such as the elimination of prison benefits for those sentenced for rape, passed in 2017.

However, crime rates remain high.

According to statistics from the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations (MIMP), between 2009 and 2017, there were 2,275 cases of gender-based violence: 991 femicides and 1,275 attempts. In this country there is an average of 10 murders of women for gender reasons per month.

The MIMP reported that last year ended with 116 victims of femicide and 223 women survivors of this kind of crime. The majority of cases, 79 percent, occurred in urban areas.

In almost 80 percent of the cases, the aggressors were men with an intimate relationship with the victims, 90.4 percent of whom were adult women.

This places Peru in eighth place in terms of femicide in the region, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and in fourth place compared to the countries in the Southern Cone of South America.

In Peru, seven out of 10 women suffer physical, psychological or sexual abuse on a routine basis by their partners, according to the Demographic and Family Health Survey (ENDES 2016), despite the current legal and regulatory framework.

Precisely to call attention to the need to act more effectively in the face of this scourge, the Ombudsman’s Office, an autonomous government body, carried out a campaign in November and December to declare 2018 as the “Year of equality and non-violence against women.”

The proposal received broad support, the commissioner at the Office of the Deputy Ombudsman for Women’s Rights of that public body, Patricia Sarmiento, had told IPS before the government declared the Decade of Equal Opportunities for Women and Men.

Sarmiento said her institution has contributed to preventing, punishing and eradicating violence against women and other members of the family carried out in the public or private sphere, under Law 30,364.

She was referring to the training of judges and police to eradicate the mistaken belief that they can apply a reconciliation mechanism in cases of violence against women committed by an intimate partner. “That is unacceptable,” she said.

“Unfortunately, this idea reaches the victims, so some believe that when they are insulted or pushed it is not an act of violence and can be subject to reconciliation, and that is what leads us to continue perpetuating this situation in the country,” Sarmiento added.

Another recommendation is to grant a budget allocation to the police for it to provide adequate protection measures for the victims. “The institution lacks sufficient logistics, staff and equipment, such as for example a georeferenced map to monitor the cases,” she said.

A 2015 report by the ombudsman’s office, based on the analysis of court records of cases of gender-based violence, reveals that in 30 percent of femicides, the victims had brought complaints against their aggressors for domestic violence.

“One of the cases was of a woman who had filed complaints four times and did not receive protection. That cannot keep happening,” said Sarmiento.

In February 2017, a similar case occurred in the central highlands region of Ayacucho, where lawyer Evelyn Corahua was murdered after reporting an attempted femicide, and requested protection measures.

“A sufficient budget is needed for proper enforcement of the law and for the implementation of policies to eradicate gender violence. Otherwise the law will only be dead letter,” Sarmiento warned.

Civil society organisations such as the Flora Tristán Centre are worried about the degree of political will that the new cabinet, named after Fujimori was granted his pardon, will have.

Melendez, the director of the organisation, said that in the face of the cruelty shown in cases of gender violence in 2017, the main challenge for this year must be to strengthen prevention.

“That would entail ensuring comprehensive sex education with a gender focus in the classroom, something that unfortunately with this government remains in question,” she said. “It is clear that the current crisis will impact the management of public policies and will affect the fight against violence against women.”

This view is shared by human rights activists and feminists through the social networks, as is the case of lawyer Patricia Carrillo, who participated in the marches against Fujimori’s pardon and in those promoted by women’s organisations for the right to live without violence. “They want to silence us but they will not succeed,” Carrillo said, in dialogue with IPS.

“Declaring the decade in this way, without taking into consideration what was proposed by the ombudsman’s office, undermines our demand for equality and non-discrimination based on gender,” she lamented. “We do not want equal opportunities in the same conditions of oppression as men, our space of struggle will continue on the streets,” she said.

Cristina Cunha, teacher at Universidad Católica de Valencia (UCV), has designed a computer application that improves children with Down syndrome’s ability to learn English. The online program, based on intelligent tutoring systems, can be used on a tablet or a computer and has doubled the performance of the elementary school students it has been tested on.

This tool, which she developed for her doctoral thesis, reveals an innovative approach compared to traditional methods. Cunha has tested it in different children’s associations in Valencia, Madrid and Málaga, and now aims to broaden the age group it could apply to, the contents it can provide and the countries where it can continue being researched.

The project, presented in the UCV, is based on the fact that ‘in today’s society there is a growing number of adult people with Down syndrome willing to enter the job market, a situation which requires them to have a specific schooling level’, Cunha explains.

That is why these people “should undergo training that follows the same structure as other students, although in a way that is adapted to their special cognitive characteristics. In this sense, one of the obligatory subjects is studying English as a foreign language,” she stressed.

To ease the group’s learning deficiencies, Cunha designed this online training system, which adapts to the cognitive profile of each student. This tool differs from other multimedia learning methods by its use of adaptive tutoring techniques.

By taking into account the learning characteristics that children with this syndrome share, the teacher has proven that “it is possible to improve the learning of a second language, English, specifically, in contrast with other methods that don’t take this collective’s cognitive profile into account.”

Even though Southeast Asian jihadists have suffered defeat in Marawi, the continued presence of key leaders pose a threat of renewed violence in the region.

By Bilveer Singh*

A major factor for the continued presence of various jihadi groups in Southeast Asia and the world at large is their ability to quickly regenerate their leaderships following the killings of their leaders in counter-terrorism operations. This is largely true of Al Qaeda and the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) as well as jihadi groups in Southeast Asia such as Jemaah Islamiyah and Abu Sayyaf.

In a way, leadership regeneration has become an important part of the organisational model of jihadi groups, which largely explains the difficulties in totally eradicating them.

The Marawi Siege

The Marawi Siege, from May to October 2017, was particularly important as it was an attempt to replicate and transplant a ‘Mosul in Iraq’ or ‘Raqqa in Syria’ in the Philippines, symbolising Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s reach in Southeast Asia as a whole. This failed but its implications are particularly significant as far as jihadi leadership in the Southeast Asian region is concerned.

While the Marawi Siege started with the Philippine Government’s attempt to capture Isnilon Hapilon, the Emir of Islamic State in the Philippines, it went awry, with the Philippine authorities losing control of the highly symbolic Islamic City of Marawi to IS and its supporters.

This was the first time a terrorist group had captured a territory in Southeast Asia, what more in an urban setting and held it for five months. It was akin to a ‘small Mosul’ or ‘small Raqqa’ in the Philippines. The five months taken to wrest back Marawi City was partly due to the difficulties involved in urban warfare, which advantaged the terrorists holed up in houses and buildings, and holding civilians hostage, including women and children.

More than 1,000 people were killed, including security personnel, civilians and terrorists. Marawi City was severely damaged, becoming the site of the heaviest fighting in the Philippines since the Second World War.

From the perspective of jihadi leadership, probably the most significant consequence of the siege was the death of its key leaders, Isnilon Hapilon and Omarkhayam Maute. This represents a severe blow to the jihadi leadership in the Philippines, especially of the pro-IS groups and directly led to the ending of the Marawi Siege.

However, as conceded by counter-terrorism officials in Malaysia and Indonesia, “the battle may be over but there is still a long way to go as far as the war is concerned”. This is primarily due to the jihadists’ ability to regenerate themselves and even more importantly, the fact that many key jihadi leaders are still alive in the Philippines and beyond.

Post-Marawi Jihadi Leaders in Southeast Asia

While ‘Osamaism’ and ‘Omarism’ have continued in the post-Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar eras in Al Qaeda and Taliban respectively, similarly, the Southeast Asian terrorist landscape continues to be determined by the presence of leading jihadists in the region. While the Jemaah Islamiyah has been decapacitated with the loss of its key leaders such as Imam Samudra, Noordin M Top, Azahari Husin and Dulmatin, the JI continues to be relevant due to its ability to replace its leaders.

In the same manner, the deaths of Hapilon and Omarkhayam have not fundamentally reduced or removed the jihadi threat in the region. Four key leaders continue to be a source of inspiration and leadership for Southeast Asian jihadists. These are Amin Baco, Bahrumsyah, Abu Turaifie and Bahrun Naim:

Amin Baco is of Bugis descent from Sulawesi, a Malaysian born in Sabah who built his jihadi credentials fighting in Jolo and Basilan in Mindanao. He is also the son-in-law of two key Abu Sayyaf commanders, including Hapilon. He is a leading bomb maker, charismatic and respected among the jihadists in Mindanao even though he does not hail from any of the tribes or clans in Mindanao. Amin is the designated leader of IS in Southeast Asia and successor of Hapilon.

Bahrumsyah is probably Indonesia’s leading terrorist, being the Emir of the Katibah Nusantara, a Southeast Asian sub-group within IS. He was among the first few Indonesians to support al-Baghdadi and IS, and is highly regarded among the jihadi circles. He is still believed to be in Syria today.

Abu Turaifie, a former member of the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF), is the leader of a group known as Muhaajireen Wal Ansar. His group is part of IS in the Philippines. Turaifie is based in Maguindanao Province and his group has had several clashes with the security forces and the MILF group.

Bahrun Naim is a far more junior jihadi operating in Iraq and Syria. While he has been trained to be a suicide bomber in Syria, his talent is more in cyberspace, putting up pro-ISIS propaganda and motivational videos. Some believe that these online videos have played a part in the recruitment of IS supporters in Indonesia, either as fighters in Syria or to undertake violent actions in Indonesia. Unconfirmed reports say Bahrun Naim is now dead.

Implications for Southeast Asia

Southeast Asian jihadists are akin to the many-headed hydra, reviving and surfacing quickly following a successful counter-terrorism operation by the authorities. In the post-Marawi era Amin Baco is believed to be hiding in Basilan or Jolo and is probably planning a counter-attack in the very near future. His links with terrorists in Sulawesi and Sabah, making him, as one analyst puts it, Southeast Asia’s first tri-border jihadist.

Added to the Amin factor is the possibility of Bahrumsyah returning to Southeast Asia following the defeat of IS in the Middle East, losing most of its territories in Iraq and Syria. If Bahrun Naim is still alive, both he and Bahrumsyah could return to Indonesia or they could transit through the Philippines’ Mindanao region and link up with pro-ISIS jihadists such as Amin and his supporters.

A Bahrumsyah-Bahrun Naim link up with Amin Baco could provide a powerful primer for Southeast Asian jihadists in the post-Marawi era and represent a heightened threat. In short, instead of being euphoric post-Marawi, there is the potential that Southeast Asian security could face an even greater existential threat compared to the past.

There is every reason to be highly vigilant as new jihadi leaders such as Amin Baco, Bahrumsyah and Bahrun Naim could continue to pose a threat post-Marawi. Even though they may be recovering from defeat in the Middle East and Marawi, they may want to launch new violent attacks to demonstrate that IS is ever present.

*Bilveer Singh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow, Centre of Excellence for National Security (CENS), S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore.

By Lisa Ferdinando

Defense Secretary James N. Mattis has highlighted the efforts aimed at strengthening diplomatic avenues for a secure, prosperous and denuclearized Korean Peninsula.

Mattis spoke to reporters  while en route to Vancouver, British Columbia, for the Foreign Ministers’ Meeting on Security and Stability on the Korean Peninsula.

“The situation we face I would call it sobering,” Mattis said. “But this meeting is designed to still make progress diplomatically, such as you’ve seen with three unanimous Security Council resolutions over these last months.”

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland is co-hosting the foreign ministers’ meeting today and tomorrow with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Mattis said his role in the conference is to provide the military situation, then leave the meeting in the hands of Tillerson and the foreign ministers.

Effort Firmly in Diplomatic Realm

“I just want to emphasize this, because this shows that this effort right now is firmly in the diplomatic realm,” he said. “That is where we are working it.”

Mattis did note that military options do exist if North Korea were to launch an attack. However, he reiterated the goal of strengthening diplomatic efforts.

Diplomatic initiatives are “starting to go in the right direction,” he said, noting developments such as North Korea saying it would send athletes and musicians to South Korea next month during the Winter Olympics.

Mattis traveled on today to visit the 366th Fighter Wing, known as the “Gunfighters,” located at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. He said he wanted to discuss readiness with the airmen there.

“They are deployable fighter squadrons under that wing, and they are the ones who are training alongside the Singaporean air force there over the Snake River in Denver,” he pointed out.

South and North Korea agreed to march together under a unified flag during the opening ceremony for the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. They also agreed to create a single women’s hockey team to compete in the games, Yonhap reported.

Deputy-level ministers attended the dialogue on Wednesday at Panmunjom’s House of Peace, where the two sides have been convening for breakthrough talks on the Olympics since early January.

The women’s hockey team is quickly becoming a symbol of reconciliation between the two Koreas.

On Wednesday, Seoul and Pyongyang agreed the hockey players should train together at Masikryong Ski Resort in North Korea, one of Kim Jong Un’s earliest projects.

The ski resort is reportedly mostly empty, and the North Koreans are allowing a South Korean team of inspectors to check the facilities before training begins for the two teams.

Delegates are also avoiding the use of a sea route to send the team to Pyeongchang.

South Korean news service News 1 reported the team is to arrive by land via the Gyeongui Line rail that connects North and South.

“North Korea’s People’s Olympic Committee’s representatives, athletes, cheerleading squad and taekwondo demonstration team and press corps will use a land route,” the delegates of North and South said in a statement.

The athletes are to arrive on Feb. 1, and the other groups, including North Korean reporters, are to travel across the border Feb. 7.

It is unclear whether North Korea’s second-most powerful politician, Choe Ryong Hae, would be attending the games.

Choe, who traveled to Rio in 2016 with North Korean Olympians, is under South Korean financial sanctions.

Original source

President Donald Trump has announced the “winners” of his “Fake News Awards.” While the link failed to open for many amid the high internet traffic, a web archive reveals the New York Times and CNN are among the top three.

Trump also tweeted that there are “great reporters” whom he respects. He did not name any of those journalists, though, unlike the treatment dished out to the “Fake News” awardees.

A blog titled “The Highly-Anticipated 2017 Fake News Awards” on the official Republican Party website shows the top winner of Trump’s fake news accolades to be New York Times columinist and economist Paul Krugman, who claimed on Election Day 2016 that the “economy would never recover” from Trump’s “historic, landslide victory,” according to a copy of the GOP blog archived by the nonprofit Internet Archive.

Second place went to ABC News’ Brian Ross, whose reporting cited an anonymous source claiming that an associate of Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn was going to testify that Trump “directed him to make contact with the Russians” while being a presidential candidate. Ross, however, corrected his story to say that Trump was president-elect at the time, only after crashing the stock market.

CNN scooped third place. Without mentioning CNN congressional correspondent Manu Raju by name, the award refers to a false report that Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., received advanced exclusive access to documents published by Wikileaks via email. Raju corrected it once he discovered that his anonymous source got the date of the email wrong, but not before several other news networks made the exact same error, also citing anonymous sources.

The so-called awards went on to list seven other inaccurate stories about Trump that were later corrected, from Trump removing a Martin Luther King, Jr. bust from the Oval Office, to Polish First Lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda not shaking his hand, to false news of the Trump administration hiding a climate change report.

The eleventh slot awarded no particular outlet or journalist. It simply read: “In Trump’s words, ‘‘RUSSIA COLLUSION!’ Russian collusion is perhaps the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American people. THERE IS NO COLLUSION!’”

Trump’s announcement coincided with an event at the Newseum in Washington, DC, where White House correspondents Jim Acosta of CNN, John Roberts of Fox News and April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks discussed “Journalism in the Trump Era: Assessing Press Freedom in the United States.” Trump was heavily criticized during the DC forum for going too far during his campaign, and, as president, for routinely condemning outlets he deemed “fake news media.”

California sea lions have fully rebounded under the protection of the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), with their population on the West Coast reaching carrying capacity in 2008 before unusually warm ocean conditions reduced their numbers, according to the first comprehensive population assessment of the species.

The sea lion population is healthy and robust, the new research found, and its recovery over the past several decades reflects an important success for the MMPA. The landmark 1972 legislation recognized marine mammals as a central element of their ocean ecosystems, setting population goals based on levels that would contribute to the health and stability of those ecosystems.

The MMPA calls those levels the Optimum Sustainable Population (OSP), and provides options for states to take over management of species that have reached their OSP.

California sea lions have now reached those levels, according to the new assessment by scientists from NOAA Fisheries’ Alaska Fisheries Science Center and Southwest Fisheries Science Center. They published the results of the long-term collaborative study today in the Journal of Wildlife Management.

“The population has basically come into balance with its environment,” said coauthor Sharon Melin, a research biologist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center who has tracked sea lion numbers in Southern California’s Channel Islands for years. “The marine environment is always changing, and their population is at a point where it responds very quickly to changes in the environment.”

Scientists combined the results of sea lion pup counts in the Channel Islands, aerial surveys of sea lion rookeries, survival rates and other information to reconstruct the growth of the sea lion population from 1975 to 2014. They gained enough insight into the dynamics of the population to fill in gaps from a few years with little data.

Market hunting, bounties, pollutants such as DDT and other forces depressed sea lion numbers in the middle of the last century. The new study found that the species then rose from less than 90,000 animals in 1975 to an estimated 281,450 in 2008, which was roughly the carrying capacity for sea lions in the California Current Ecosystem at that time. It then fluctuated around that level, reaching a high of 306,220 in 2012 before declining below the carrying capacity in the years since as ocean conditions changed.

Such a long-term reconstruction of the sea lion population has never been done before, said Robert DeLong, leader of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center’s California Current Ecosystems Program and a coauthor of the new research.

The researchers found sea lion numbers very sensitive to environmental changes, especially changes in ocean temperatures that affect their prey. Their models based on past population shifts predict that an increase of 1 degree C in sea surface temperature off the West Coast will reduce sea lion population growth to zero, while an increase of 2 degrees will lead to a 7 percent decline in the population.

“When the California Current is not productive, they respond pretty fast and dramatically,” Melin said. “They’re out there in the ocean sampling it all the time. That makes them a very powerful indicator of what’s happening in the marine environment.”

Marine conditions since 2012 have illustrated that. An unusual marine heat wave off the West Coast known as “the blob” combined with an El Niño climate pattern reduced pup production and survival, with thousands of malnourished pups stranding on Southern California beaches. NOAA Fisheries declared the elevated number of deaths an Unusual Mortality Event in 2013.

The sea lion population dropped to just over 250,000 in 2013 and 2014.

“This is not just a story about continued growth of the population,” DeLong said. “These last several years have brought new environmental stresses to the California Current, and we’ve seen that reflected by the sea lions.”

Understanding the relationship between sea lion numbers and the environment can help scientists detect signals of coming change. Wildlife managers can then use that information to anticipate and prepare for shifts in the ecosystem and its inhabitants.

“It helps us to understand the factors driving this population, because we can incorporate them into management decisions,” said Chris Yates, Assistant Regional Administrator for Protected Resources in NOAA Fisheries’ West Coast Region.

The general recovery of sea lion numbers has had other consequences on the West Coast, including conflicts with people over beach access where sea lions haul out and concern about sea lion predation on threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead in the Northwest. NOAA Fisheries has authorized Oregon, Washington and Idaho to remove individually identifiable sea lions near the Columbia River’s Bonneville Dam that have been spotted repeatedly preying on fish protected under the Endangered Species Act.

The species maintained OSP levels even when small numbers of adult males were being removed to protect salmon runs in the Columbia River and climate events were depressing growth. That suggests that the removal of a limited number of sea lions in such programs is unlikely to affect the population as a whole, Melin said.

She stressed the value of long-term data in understanding the dynamics of the population. “If we had looked only at the last five years, we would have thought sea lions were in a tailspin,” she said. “Because we know the history of the population, we can put the recent decline in perspective.”

Some Antarctic fish living in the planet’s coldest waters are able to cope with the stress of rising carbon dioxide levels the ocean. They can even tolerate slightly warmer waters. But they can’t deal with both stressors at the same time, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.

The study, published recently in the journal Global Change Biology, of emerald rockcod is the first to show that Antarctic fishes may make tradeoffs in their physiology and behavior to cope with ocean acidification and warming waters.

“In dealing with climate stress, these fish are really bad multi-taskers,” said senior author Anne Todgham, an associate professor with the UC Davis Department of Animal Science. “They seem quite capable of coping with increases in CO2, and they can compensate for some warming. But they can’t deal with both stressors at the same time. That’s a problem because those things happen together–you don’t get CO2 dissolving in the ocean independent of warming.”

TRADEOFFS

Antarctic fishes live in water that is typically about -1.9C (28.6F). At their field site in Antarctica, the authors exposed emerald rockcod to two temperatures: -1 degree Celsius (30F) and 2 degrees Celsius (36F). The latter is the threshold for global warming that the Paris Agreement targets to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. They also exposed the fish to treatments of three different levels of CO2 ranging from ambient to elevated projected levels.

Increased CO2 levels by themselves had little impact on the fish. After a couple of weeks, heart, ventilation and metabolic rates increased with warming. Their behavior also changed with warming. The fish swam less and preferred dark zones, which suggests they were attempting to conserve energy. Then after 28 days, juvenile rockcod were able to compensate for the warming temperatures. However, this temperature compensation only happened in the absence of rising CO2.

NO COLDER PLACES TO GO

While some species are beginning to shift to cooler places to escape warming habitats, polar fish have no colder places to go. They have to cope by using their existing physiology, which the study shows is limited.

Emerald rockcod help form the basis of the Antarctic food web, supporting an ecosystem of species such as Emperor penguins and seals.

“The Antarctic has contributed very little to the production of greenhouse gases, and yet it’s one of the places on the planet receiving the most impact,” Todgham said. “I feel we have responsibility to care about the spaces that are so fragile. If we can provide reservoirs of areas that are less stressful to plants and animals through protecting natural places, we can buy ourselves some time to deal with things like climate change that will take a long time to get in line.”

By Albrecht Meier

(EurActiv) — With the next European Parliament elections just over a year away, the guessing games and rumour mills about who will helm the EU institutions into the next decade have already fired up. EURACTIV Germany’s partner Der Tagesspiegel reports.

Former Parliament President Martin Schulz published his book, The Chained Giant, almost five years ago, in which he called for more transparency in Brussels and, as a crafty aside, advertised his intention to run as a ‘Spitzenkandidat’ in the 2014 European elections.

Schulz’s bid to become president of the European Commission ended when he conceded defeat to Jean-Claude Juncker. It was also the first time that a European election decided who became head of the EU executive, although German Chancellor Angela Merkel only agreed to the procedure reluctantly.

No “Spitzenkandidaten” procedure

Those who are aware of that background were quick to notice that a commitment to the “Spitzenkandidat” procedure was missing from the three-page chapter on Europe in the consultation paper by the CDU, CSU and SPD published last Friday.

A consideration of national politics has not stopped the two main European political groups from seeking to repeat the process.

The socialist family of parties again wants to put forward a top candidate, while the “Spitzenkandidat” procedure is laid down in the statutes of the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP).

But that does not change the fact that the heads of state and government could theoretically return to the old procedure and decide on who will succeed Juncker – who intends to serve only one term – among themselves after the European elections.

In November, Europe’s conservatives will decide in Helsinki on who should succeed Juncker. The frontrunner is the Frenchman Michel Barnier, who as chief negotiator deals with Brexit. The 67-year-old Frenchman sought the nomination as the EPP candidate in 2014 but was defeated by Juncker in an internal party vote.

If Barnier prevails this time he will be best placed to succeed Juncker. The EPP won the most seats in the last European elections, and that is likely to be repeated next year.

Macron signals support for Vestager

However, at least in France, the party landscape since the election victory of President Emmanuel Macron is strongly in motion. Socialists and conservative parties have been decimated. Macron himself has already indicated that the Liberal Commissioner for Competition, Denmark’s Margrethe Vestager could succeed Juncker.

Mogherini in the running for the Socialists

The Party of European Socialists, meanwhile, is not expected to repeat its experience of having a German as its top candidate.

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, an Italian, is regarded as a strong contender, while Juncker’s vice-president, Dutchman Frans Timmermans, is also mentioned as a possible candidate. However, the socialists will need to reverse their recent run of election defeats to have a chance of naming Juncker’s successor.

The cryptocurrency bitcoin plunged massively this week, dropping to $10,200 on Tuesday and sparking speculation on what could have caused the fall and whether the cryptocurrency is actually of any use.

Bitcoin dropped to some $10,200 on the Bitstamp exchange earlier this week, as South Korean officials once again mulled the possibility of cracking down on the exchanges. At the time this article was written, the cryptocurrency had regained some of its value, rising to some $11,600.

Still, this is almost a 50 percent drop if compared to December’s record price of almost $20,000 for one coin.

Considering that one of the two main pillars of bitcoin is a lack of governmental control, the mere mention that the cryptocurrency might be taken over by governments was enough to cause massive selloffs. China has already banned cryptocurrency exchanges, and South Korea — the world’s largest cryptocurrency market right now — is trying to assess how to deal with the blockchain currency and whether it should be banned.

Shutting down cryptocurrency exchanges in South Korea is still an option, Straits Times quotes South Korean Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon as saying. However, he believes that such drastic measures require “serious” discussion between ministries.

“We’ve heard reports that South Korea, China and Japan have considered a shared approach, a path, to regulation,” says Neil Wilson, senior market analyst in London for online trading platform ETX Capital. “It looks like the light touch that has allowed the crypto-boom to explode may be coming to an end,” he wrote in a note for investors.

However, fears of governmental crackdown are arguably exaggerated; as the Financial Post’s Joe Chidley points out, when China cracked down on cryptocurrency, most of the market simply moved to another jurisdiction — mostly Japan and, to a lesser extent, Canada.

What one can say for sure is that bitcoin remains extremely volatile. Unlike gold, whose value, if imaginary, has survived for thousands of years, the cryptocurrency is currently only supported by the optimistic belief that it will never be controlled by anyone. Right now, it is not even a suitable payment method, with processing time varying vastly, from eight minutes to some incredible 55 hours on New Year’s Eve. The movement to create a different kind of bitcoin that could improve processing time failed after the proponents of the idea officially gave up in order to avoid a major split.

A ranking Iranian military official warned of hostile schemes to create a rift between the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) and the people.

Addressing a meeting of IRGC public relations officials in Tehran on Wednesday, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Brigadier General Massoud Jazayeri said the IRGC relies on people as its greatest asset.

There is no gap between the IRGC and the Iranian nation, the general added, saying the enemies are trying to create such a rift because the IRGC has been at the forefront of the fight against the enemies of the Islamic community.

In July 2017, IRGC Commander Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari said his forces are actively involved in development plans all over the country, noting that the IRGC sees no limits to its role in helping create jobs and improve the livelihood of people should the administration prepare the grounds.

Following a big earthquake in Iran’s western province of Kermanshah in November, the IRGC forces were deployed to the quake-hit areas and played a leading role in the rescue and relief operations, particularly in the rural areas.

The IRGC has promised to keep offering relief aid for the victims of the earthquake until they are provided with permanent housing.

In a long-term national study, breastfeeding for six months or longer cuts the risk of developing type 2 diabetes nearly in half for women throughout their childbearing years, according to new Kaiser Permanente research published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

“We found a very strong association between breastfeeding duration and lower risk of developing diabetes, even after accounting for all possible confounding risk factors,” said lead author Erica P. Gunderson, PhD, MS, MPH, senior research scientist with the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research.

Women who breastfed for six months or more across all births had a 47 percent reduction in their risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared to those who did not breastfeed at all. Women who breastfed for six months or less had a 25 percent reduction in diabetes risk.

Dr. Gunderson and colleagues analyzed data during the 30 years of follow up from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study, a national, multi-center investigation of cardiovascular disease risk factors that originally enrolled about 5,000 adults aged 18 to 30 in 1985 to 1986, including more than 1,000 members of Kaiser Permanente Northern California.

The new findings add to a growing body of evidence that breastfeeding [hyperlinked to above] has protective effects for both mothers and their offspring, including lowering a mother’s risk of breast and ovarian cancer. The CARDIA findings are also consistent with those of the NIH-funded Study of Women, Infant Feeding and Type 2 Diabetes after GDM Pregnancy (SWIFT), also led by Gunderson, which includes routine biochemical screening for diabetes in women after gestational diabetes from the early postpartum period and years later.

The long-term benefits of breastfeeding on lower diabetes risk were similar for black women and white women, and women with and without gestational diabetes. Black women were three times as likely as white women to develop diabetes within the 30-year study, which is consistent with higher risk found by others. Black women enrolled in CARDIA were also less likely to breastfeed than white women.

“The incidence of diabetes decreased in a graded manner as breastfeeding duration increased, regardless of race, gestational diabetes, lifestyle behaviors, body size, and other metabolic risk factors measured before pregnancy, implying the possibility that the underlying mechanism may be biological,” Gunderson said. Several plausible biological mechanisms are possible for the protective effects of breastfeeding, including the influence of lactation-associated hormones on the pancreatic cells that control blood insulin levels and thereby impact blood sugar.

Based on the strong evidence for the numerous health benefits of breastfeeding for mothers and babies, Kaiser Permanente provides strong support for all mothers who choose to breastfeed.

“We have known for a long time that breastfeeding has many benefits both for mothers and babies, however, previous evidence showed only weak effects on chronic disease in women,” said Tracy Flanagan, MD, director of women’s health for Kaiser Permanente Northern California. “Now we see much stronger protection from this new study showing that mothers who breastfeed for months after their delivery, may be reducing their risk of developing type 2 diabetes by up to one half as they get older. This is yet another reason that doctors, nurses, and hospitals as well as policymakers should support women and their families to breastfeed as long as possible.”

This study included 1,238 black and white women who did not have diabetes when they enrolled in CARDIA, or prior to their subsequent pregnancies. Over the next 30 years, each woman had at least one live birth and was routinely screened for diabetes under the CARDIA protocol, which included diagnostic screening criteria for diabetes. Participants also reported lifestyle behaviors (such as diet and physical activity) and the total amount of time they breastfed their children.

“Unlike previous studies of breastfeeding, which relied on self-reporting of diabetes onset and began to follow older women later in life, we were able to follow women specifically during the childbearing period and screen them regularly for diabetes before and after pregnancies, Gunderson said. She and her colleagues were also able to account for pre-pregnancy metabolic risk, including obesity and fasting glucose and insulin, lifestyle behaviors, family history of diabetes, and perinatal outcomes.

Qatar signed a security agreement with NATO at the Alliance’s Headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday.

At a signing ceremony, Brigadier General Tariq Khalid M. F. Alobaidli, Head of the International Military Cooperation Department, Armed Forces of the State of Qatar, and NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller, stressed the importance of NATO’s cooperation with Qatar in the framework of the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI).

This security agreement provides the framework for the protection of exchange of classified information, as defined by all 29 member countries. These agreements are signed by NATO partner countries that wish to engage in cooperation with NATO.

All four ICI partner countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and U.A.E.) have now signed individual security agreements with NATO. This enables the Individual Partnership and Cooperation Programmes (IPCP) of the ICI countries with NATO to be implemented as effectively as possible.

Because of their high precision and speed, Delta robots are deployed in many industrial processes, including pick-and-place assemblies, machining, welding and food packaging.

Starting with the first version developed by Reymond Clavel for a chocolate factory to quickly place chocolate pralines in their packages, Delta robots use three individually controlled and lightweight arms that guide a platform to move fast and accurately in three directions. The platform is either used as a stage, similar to the ones being used in flight simulators, or coupled to a manipulating device that can, for example, grasp, move, and release objects in prescribed patterns. Over time, roboticists have designed smaller and smaller Delta robots for tasks in limited workspaces, yet shrinking them further to the millimeter scale with conventional manufacturing techniques and components has proven fruitless.

Reported in Science Robotics, a new design, the milliDelta robot, developed by Robert Wood’s team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) overcomes this miniaturization challenge. By integrating their microfabrication technique with high-performance composite materials that can incorporate flexural joints and bending actuators, the milliDelta can operate with high speed, force, and micrometer precision, which make it compatible with a range of micromanipulation tasks in manufacturing and medicine.

In 2011, inspired by pop-up books and origami, Wood’s team developed a micro-fabrication approach that enables the assembly of robots from flat sheets of composite materials. Pop-up MEMS (short for “microelectromechanical systems”) manufacturing has since been used for the construction of dynamic centimeter-scale machines that can simply walk away, or, as in the case of the RoboBee, can fly. In their new study, the researchers applied their approach to develop a Delta robot measuring a mere 15 mm-by-15 mm-by-20 mm.

“The physics of scaling told us that bringing down the size of Delta robots would increase their speed and acceleration, and pop-up MEMS manufacturing with its ability to use any material or combination of materials seemed an ideal way to attack this problem,” said Wood, who is a Core Faculty member at the Wyss Institute and co-leader of its Bioinspired Robotics platform. Wood is also the Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at SEAS. “This approach also allowed us to rapidly go through a number of iterations that led us to the final milliDelta.”

The milliDelta design incorporates a composite laminate structure with embedded flexural joints that approximate the more complicated joints found in large scale Delta robots. “With the help of an assembly jig, this laminate can be precisely folded into a millimeter-scale Delta robot. The milliDelta also utilizes piezoelectric actuators, which allow it to perform movements at frequencies 15 to 20 times higher than those of other currently available Delta robots,” said first-author Hayley McClintock, a Wyss Institute Staff Researcher on Wood’s team.

In addition, the team demonstrated that the milliDelta can operate in a workspace of about seven cubic millimeters and that it can apply forces and exhibit trajectories that, together with its high frequencies, could make it ideal for micromanipulations in industrial pick-and-place processes and microscopic surgeries such as retinal microsurgeries performed on the human eye.

Putting the milliDelta’s potential for microsurgeries and other micromanipulations to a first test, the researchers explored their robot as a hand tremor-cancelling device. “We first mapped the paths that the tip of a toothpick circumscribed when held by an individual, computed those, and fed them into the milliDelta robot, which was able to match and cancel them out,” said co-first author Fatma Zeynep Temel, Ph.D., a SEAS Postdoctoral Fellow in Wood’s team. The researchers think that specialized milliDelta robots could either be added on to existing robotic devices, or be developed as standalone devices like, for example, platforms for the manipulation of cells in research and clinical laboratories.

“The work by Wood’s team demonstrating the enhanced speed and control of their milliDelta robot at the millimeter scale opens entirely new avenues of development for industrial and medical robots, which are currently beyond the reach of existing technologies. It’s yet another example of how our Bioinspired Robotics platform is leading the way into the future,” said Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., who is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at HMS and the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, as well as Professor of Bioengineering at SEAS.

By Tia Asmara

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo appointed a top official of Indonesia’s second largest political party and retired military leaders to his cabinet Wednesday, a shake-up that analysts see as a move to strengthen support ahead of coming elections, including presidential polls next year.

It was the third time Jokowi reshuffled his cabinet since he took office in October 2014, and the first time since July 2016, when the Golkar party left the opposition bloc and joined a ruling alliance led by his Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P).

On Wednesday, Jokowi appointed Golkar Secretary-General Idrus Marham, 55, to replace Social Affairs Minister Khofifah Indar Parawansa, 52, a politician from the Islamic-based National Awakening Party (PKB). Khofifah resigned so she could contest the June 2018 gubernatorial election in East Java province, which will be among regional polls taking place across Indonesia this year.

“This is a technical reshuffle, besides it is a necessity. However, the nomination of Idrus is quite surprising because the allocation fell to Golkar again, not to PKB even though there are many candidates in PKB and NU (Nahdlatul Ulama) who are capable of handling social issues,” Tobias Basuki, a researcher with the Jakarta-based Center For Strategic and International Studies, told BenarNews.

NU, Indonesia’s largest moderate Muslim organization, is the National Awakening Party’s main supporter.

Jokowi also appointed retired Indonesian National Armed Force (TNI) chief Moeldoko, 60, to replace Teten Masduki, as his chief of staff (KSP).

In addition, Jowoki swore in Air Marshal Yuyu Sutisna, 55, as Air Force Chief of Staff. Yuyu replaces Chief Air Marshal Hadi Tjahjanto who was appointed in December as chief of the armed forces following the early retirement of Gen. Gatot Nurmantyo.

Agum Gumelar, 72, another retired military leader, was sworn in as a member of the Presidential Advisory Committee. He fills a position that has been open since Hasyim Muzadi, a former NU chairman, died in March 2017.

Teten, 54, a former activist with Indonesia Corruption Watch, a local NGO, and a key member of his campaign team in 2014, will have a new role.

“Pak Teten now will always be near me, as the special staff coordinator. Every day he has to be near me,” Jokowi told journalists after the swearing-in of Idrus and Moeldoko.

Honeymoon with Golkar

Idrus is the third Golkar member to hold ministerial positions in Jokowi’s administration, joining Luhut Pandjaitan, the coordinating minister for Maritime Affairs, and Industry Minister Airlangga Hartarto, who was appointed in July 2016.

In the 2014 election, Golkar backed the losing presidential candidate, Prabowo Subianto. Two years later, the party gave its support to Jokowi, when it switched to the ruling coalition.

“This reshuffle is a honeymoon moment for Jokowi and Golkar and adds to Jokowi’s strategy of increasing Golkar’s bargaining position against the PDI-P,” Syamsuddin Haris, a political observer from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), told BenarNews.

Another political analyst, Burhanudin Muhtadi, said the latest reshuffle of Jokowi’s cabinet represented a victory for Golkar and the president.

“Since Golkar entered the cabinet, political stability has proven to be improving and maintained,” he told BenarNews.

Unlike, PDI-P, which has not revealed who it will endorse in 2019, Golkar has expressed support for Jokowi.

Military support

Analysts said the addition of two retired generals to Jokowi’s administration is a tactic to get military support for the 2019 presidential election.

The opposition coalition’s main party, Gerakan Indonesia Raya (Gerindra), endorsed Prabowo Subianto, a former army general, for president.

Tobias Basuki expects that Moeldoko will be supporting Jokowi in 2019.

“The public has the perception that TNI still has an important role in maintaining stability, especially toward the 2018 regional elections and the 2019 presidential election,” Tobias said.

Right activists, however, questioned Moeldoko’s appointment.

“We are concerned about the agenda of dealing with past human rights violations that had been initiated by KSP. In the hands of Moeldoko, will the human rights violation problem be an important priority?” said Hendardi, chairman of the Setara Institute, a Jakarta-based human rights group.

Although Moeldoko is not directly linked to past rights violations, Hendardi said, his military background casts doubt on his independence in addressing the problem.

Meanwhile, Leonard Simanjuntak, executive director of Greenpeace Indonesia, expressed doubt that a military background was well suited for the job of the president’s chief of staff. That person should have a background focusing on socio-economic development issues, he said.

“We are concerned that this reshuffle gives a false signal that a military person is more capable than a civilian person, and we believe that even if Teten had to be replaced, there are more than enough capable civilian candidates,” Leonard told BenarNews.

“We are quite concerned that Mr. Moeldoko’s military background is generally closer to the corporate community, while the role of KSP is crucial to channel the voice of the people who become victims to the president,” he said.

By Mary Rezac

Last week, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens admitted to an extramarital affair with his former hairdresser, although he denied allegations that he subsequently blackmailed her.

Greitens issued a joint statement with his wife saying that they had dealt with the affair privately, while his attorney issued a statement denying the blackmail allegations.

The allegations came as a surprise to many, given Greitens’ public persona as a family man, and a devout follower of Judaism. Critics have accused the governor of hypocrisy, and he recently cancelled a statewide tour promoting a new state tax plan.

But recent data shows that Greitens’ infidelity is not the norm among religiously active people.

According to data gathered from the recent General Social Survey (GSS) by NORC, a non-partisan research institution at the University of Chicago, people who attended religious services at least semi-regularly were less likely to cheat on their spouses than people who attended religious services once a year or less.

The data was analyzed in a blog post by Wendy Wang, director of research with the Institute for Family Studies.

Wang said that while the data didn’t indicate whether the type of religious service played a role, “it’s a fact that people who regularly attend religious services are less likely to cheat.”

“I think it’s interesting how your faith could play a role in your relationship,” Wang told CNA. “It probably has something to do with what the church or the synagogue is teaching you. A lot of religions emphasize the importance of family, marriage stability, so that’s probably why it has such an impact,” she said.

The data showed that attendance at religious services was the strongest factor among both genders that indicated a low likelihood of infidelity.

On the whole, factors that indicate chances of infidelity varied widely between the two genders, Wang noted. For example, race and age were strong determining factors of the chances of infidelity among men, while for women, political party identification and family background were significant determining factors.

However, religious service attendance remained a significant factor for both genders, even when controlling for other variables, Wang said.

Family background was also a strong determining factor in indicating whether someone might cheat, Wang said. While it was a stronger determining factor for women, family background played a significant role overall in determining whether people were likely to cheat.

“Overall, Democrats, adults who didn’t grow up in intact families, and those who rarely or never attend religious services are more likely than others to have cheated on their spouse. For example, 15% of adults who grew up with both biological parents have cheated on their spouse before, compared with 18% of those who didn’t grow up in intact families,” Wang wrote.

“I don’t know the reasons why exactly, but we do see that people who grow up with both parents married to each other, they’re less likely to cheat,” Wang told CNA. “I think it is important to see how a steady family, a stable marriage actually could help even in your children’s marriage quality.”

Wang’s research also indicated that cheaters – both men and women – are more likely to be divorced or separated than non-cheaters.

“Men who cheated are more likely than their female peers to be married. Among men who have cheated on their spouse before, 61% are currently married, while 34% are divorced or separated. However, only 44% of women who have cheated before are currently married, while 47% are divorced or separated,” Wang wrote in her post.

However, the data doesn’t indicate whether men are more likely to remain married to the spouse whom they cheated on, or to remarry after infidelity, Wang said.

“Basically the question is who’s more likely to forgive their cheating spouse? I don’t have numbers for that,” Wang said. “What I see here is we definitely see a consequence for cheating.”

Part of the reason for the discrepancy among marriage rates after infidelity could be the differing reasons why men and women cheat, Wang said. Cheating men may more often act out of physical impulses, while women who cheat may be more likely to be emotionally involved in their affairs, and more likely to divorce as a result of them, she said.

“That might explain some of the gender difference there, but it’s hard to say,” she said.

Overall, Wang said that the data and analysis are important, especially as more accusations of sexual misconduct come out against celebrities and politicians, many of whom are married.

“That’s why I was interested to take a look and see the data; it is amazing to see how things have changed in a few months,” Wang said.

Wang said what couples can take from the analysis is that “there’s consequences to cheating…I just wanted people to be aware that there’s consequences to cheating and it’s very detrimental to a relationship.”

By Ana Maria Luca

Romanian Social Democrat MEP Viorica Dancila is set to become Romania’s first woman prime minister.

Romanian President Klaus Iohannis on Wednesday agreed to appoint Social Democrat MEP Viorica Dancila as the country’s first ever woman prime minister.

Dancila, 55, was nominated by the ruling Social Democrat Party on Tuesday to head Romania’s third cabinet in the last year.

Her predecessor, former PM Mihai Tudose, handed in his resignation after losing the backing of his own party after he came into conflict with the Social Democrats’ leadership.

Iohannis said Wednesday that he accepted the ruling party’s proposal to sack Tudose and replace him with Dancila as a way to maintain stability in the country. He also said he is cognizant of the fact that the Social Democrats hold a majority in the Parliament and the opposition would have a hard time forming a cabinet.

“I invite all those involved in the procedures to mobilize their resources and get to work fast. It’s possible that by February 1 the whole procedure will be finalized and the new cabinet needs to get to work and solve problems, not cause them,” Iohannis said.

Social Democrat leader Liviu Dragnea announced Wednesday evening that the Parliament would convene on January 29 for a confidence vote.

Romania’s interim cabinet will be headed by Defence Minister Mihai Fifor.