Ever since Donald Trump entered politics, he has been critical of the media. During the US Presidential election, his tirade against the media almost reached peak level. Now, even after becoming the President after his controversial election campaign, he has not tapered down the intensity of his attack on the media. The latest tirade against the media by Trump was at Davos, where he was supposed to have gone to speak about America’s economic interests. Obviously, the hatred against the media occupies the uppermost level in his mindset.

It is not clear as to who started this “war” between Trump and the media, whether it was Trump or the media.

While Trump loses no opportunity to express his disapproval of the media in the US, which now almost appears to have become an obsession for him, the US media has behaved no better. Why the US media? Most sections of the media around the world seem to dislike Trump and want him to exit the political scene.

In most cases, the media’s writings and discussions about Trump have been in harsh terms and totally impolite, discourteous and sometimes seem to be an extreme view point.

Even many of those, who are critical of Trump for continuing his campaign against the media, do think that the media also has severely erred in viewing President Trump and his actions with prejudiced and blurred vision. The media seems to have forgotten that it has to be neutral and unbiased in commenting and interpreting the scenario under any circumstances.

In India too, another democratic country providing almost limitless freedom to the media, a section of media appears to be carrying on a motivated campaign against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and does not see anything good in whatever he has done so far. The media invariably gives prominence to the utterances of critics of Modi and tries to make it look as if it represents the national view, though some of these critics belong to fringe groups known for their extreme and narrow views. While any government will have some flaws, fairness requires that both the good and the bad should be highlighted instead of focusing largely on negatives only. In this respect, US and Indian media seem to have something in common.

In earlier days, it was well known that politicians around the world had generally self-centered views and would not hesitate to chalk out schemes to advance their personal interests, sometimes even over the national interests. Politicians never had the best image as honest crusaders. But, in the past, this has not been the image of the journalists and media personnel.

People always expected that media by its structure and approach should be keeping the national interest in view under any circumstances and its observations must be fair, logical and should be able to stand fair scrutiny. In other words, the media was considered as the conscience keeper of the nation and the voice of the people. One has to now ask whether the media these days meets such expectations. Many people around the world think today that it is no more the media that we know of.

Today, most of the print and visual media are managed by the business houses, who have profit as their priority motive and sometimes are owned by political parties that have set views on any matter. With profit the theme becoming the central focus of media houses, it is inevitable that principles as per the journalistic ethos has become the first casualty and gone for a toss.

It is high time now that both President Trump and US media should introspect, keeping the long term view of the nation and immediately stop this mutual bickering. The present tussle between President Trump and US media is not doing credit to either of them.

Particularly, the US media should realize that President Trump will cease to be President after his term and the next incumbent may be more cautious in his utterances. However, the media’s reputation, once it is lost, cannot be retrieved in such quick time and it would be a very long haul for the media to retrieve its credibility and glory.

If it can be said that any one person is responsible for Donald Trump’s election then Robert Mercer is the clear choice. The founder of Renaissance Technologies hedge fund is a billionaire, backer of Republican politicians to the tune of $25 million in 2016, and patron of the effort to take the United Kingdom out of the European Union. When Trump’s campaign was foundering under the onslaught of Hillary Clinton’s $1 billion, Mercer brought him a lifeline of cash and staff like Steve Bannon.

The corporate media have said far too little about Mercer’s influence, preferring to create elaborate scenarios of Russian government interference. Vladimir Putin is the scapegoat for Democratic Party chicanery and incompetence and is a perennial target because he insists on acting in his country’s interests. The Mercer story is a secret hiding in plain sight. It is the stuff of spy thrillers but it is all too real. An ultra-rich right winger put Trump in the White House and now controls the country’s political agenda.

According to a former Mercer employee he is not just conservative. He is an outspoken racist too. David Magerman says that Mercer told him the following : “The United States began to go in the wrong direction after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s; African-Americans were doing fine in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s before The Civil Rights Act; The Civil Rights Act ‘infantilized’ African Americans by making them dependent on government and removing any incentive to work; The only racist people remaining in the U.S. are black; and White people have no racial animus toward African-Americans anymore, and if there is any, it’s not something the government should be concerned with.”

Mercer certainly isn’t forcing Trump to do anything he doesn’t want. The two are in sync politically and ideologically. Not only are the two racists, but they want to reduce government to “the size of a pinhead.” A man who hates black people and wants to destroy any governmental authority is the one who made good on the white American yearning for their very own president.

Trump is still a highly sought after Mercer prize. When Steve Bannon was identified as a source for the recent book Fire and Fury he was immediately and very publicly cut off from Mercer’s largesse. After attacking Trump, Bannon is a now a nonperson in the eyes of his former boss.

The ultra-rich far right have reached their holy grail. They have gotten more from Trump than from any other Republican but one wouldn’t know that from reading a newspaper. The corporate media say hardly a word about the man who is most responsible for Trump’s presidency and who intends to get rid of as much governmental power as he possibly can.

Trump has already dismantled net neutrality, appointed cabinet officers who destroy the work of their respective agencies and uses every opportunity to pull Obamacare apart piece by piece. The recent tax bill accelerated the bipartisan effort to give rich people even more money and in so doing starve the government of revenue. As for Mercer, “He’s happy if people don’t trust the government. And if the president’s a bozo? He’s fine with that. He wants it all to fall down.”

It must be pointed out that Democrats have played their own role in destroying an array of governmental protections. Bill Clinton did away with the right to public assistance and was on the verge of a deal with Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security. Barack Obama bailed out the banks, extended the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthy and began governmental austerity that cut the budget of every federal agency.

One would think that Mercer would be a target of Democratic Party ire but his name goes unmentioned. He is a problem for them because they have done in small steps what he is doing in one fell swoop. The Democrats are happily beholden to rich people too. They have had a sort of deal wherein they do the minimum to fight for more inclusive policies while they also do the bidding of banks, big pharma, school privatizers and any other interest group who will pay for their loyalty. But Mercer and Trump have cut out the middle man. They have the power to gut it all.

The people are at the mercy of the far right and have no effective political opposition.

For the first time since 1866, three lunar events will coincide on the same day – A blood moon total lunar eclipse, a super moon and a blue moon will be visible to us on 31st January 2018 at the moon rise in the eastern horizon after 6.15 p.m, according to Professor in Physics, and Director, Astronomy and Space Science Unit of the University of Colombo Prof. Chandana Jayaratne.

“When two full moons fall on the same month the second full moon is called the blue moon. This is just a name and the moon does not appear in blue color,” said Jayaratne.

Jayaratne further said that size and brightness of the full moons on poya days vary slightly from month to month because of the non-circular but elliptical shape of the Moon’s orbit around the Earth with closest distance of Moon to the Earth (“perigee”) is about 50,000 km closer than the furthest distance (“apogee”). On January 31, at perigee, the moon lies only 358,995 km away from the Earth. As a result, the moon will appear 14% bigger and 30% brighter than some of the full moons that we have seen in the past. A similar event occurred on 2018 January 1st full moon day too.

When a Full Moon takes place while the Moon is near its closest approach to Earth, it is called a Super Full Moon or a Super moon. A Micro moon, on the other hand, is when a Full or a New Moon is near its farthest point from Earth, around apogee. It’s also known as a Minimoon, and in this year the smallest full moon is due on July 27th 2018 and there will a total lunar eclipse on that day too.

There will be a total lunar eclipse too on the same day visible to Sri Lanka with the moon rising from the eastern horizon around 6.15 p.m. The eclipse begins at 4.21 p.m. Sri Lanka Standard Time and will end up at 9.38 p.m. on January 31st, 2018. Since beginning of the eclipse occurs during day time for Sri Lanka only the latter part of this eclipse is visible to us after sunset.

Total part of the eclipse can be seen after 6.22 p.m. with the moon entering completely into the umbra – the dark shadow of the Earth. The maximum eclipse occurs at 6.59 p.m., total part of the eclipse ends at 7.38 p.m., partial eclipse ends at 8.41 p.m. After that the moon will enter into the less dark shadow of the earth, the penumbra and only the dimming of the moon light will occur till eclipse ends at 9.38 p.m. with the moon leaving the penumbral part of the eclipse said Prof. Chandana Jayaratne. This eclipse is visible to many countries in Asia, Australia, Pacific and North America. The best time to observe the eclipse is from 6.15 p.m. to 8.41 p.m. and watch towards eastern sky above the horizon.

A total lunar eclipse is sometimes called a Blood Moon, because of the reddish colour of the Full Moon takes on when fully eclipsed. As the Sun’s rays pass through the earth’s atmosphere, some colors in the light spectrum are filtered out due to scattering. Red wavelengths are least affected by this effect, so the light reaching the Moon’s surface has a reddish hue, causing the fully eclipsed Moon to take on a red color.

There will be somewhat high tide on this day due to the closeness of the moon but no earthquakes or other natural disasters has reported in the past on similar occasions, though there are rumors spreading about onset of natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones said Prof. Jayaratne.

You may perceive the world the way your friends do, according to a Dartmouth study finding that friends have similar neural responses to real-world stimuli and these similarities can be used to predict who your friends are.

The researchers found that you can predict who people are friends with just by looking at how their brains respond to video clips. Friends had the most similar neural activity patterns, followed by friends-of-friends who, in turn, had more similar neural activity than people three degrees removed (friends-of-friends-of-friends).

Published in Nature Communications, the study is the first of its kind to examine the connections between the neural activity of people within a real-world social network, as they responded to real-world stimuli, which in this case was watching the same set of videos. (A pdf of the study is available upon request. Link to paper will be live once the embargo has lifted).

“Neural responses to dynamic, naturalistic stimuli, like videos, can give us a window into people’s unconstrained, spontaneous thought processes as they unfold. Our results suggest that friends process the world around them in exceptionally similar ways,” says lead author Carolyn Parkinson, who was a postdoctoral fellow in psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth at the time of the study and is currently an assistant professor of psychology and director of the Computational Social Neuroscience Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The study analyzed the friendships or social ties within a cohort of nearly 280 graduate students. The researchers estimated the social distance between pairs of individuals based on mutually reported social ties. Forty-two of the students were asked to watch a range of videos while their neural activity was recorded in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. The videos spanned a range of topics and genres, including politics, science, comedy and music videos, for which a range of responses was expected. Each participant watched the same videos in the same order, with the same instructions. The researchers then compared the neural responses pairwise across the set of students to determine if pairs of students who were friends had more similar brain activity than pairs further removed from each other in their social network.

The findings revealed that neural response similarity was strongest among friends, and this pattern appeared to manifest across brain regions involved in emotional responding, directing one’s attention and high-level reasoning. Even when the researchers controlled for variables, including left-handed- or right-handedness, age, gender, ethnicity, and nationality, the similarity in neural activity among friends was still evident. The team also found that fMRI response similarities could be used to predict not only if a pair were friends but also the social distance between the two.

“We are a social species and live our lives connected to everybody else. If we want to understand how the human brain works, then we need to understand how brains work in combination– how minds shape each other,” explains senior author Thalia Wheatley, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth, and principal investigator of the Dartmouth Social Systems Laboratory.

For the study, the researchers were building on their earlier work, which found that as soon as you see someone you know, your brain immediately tells you how important or influential they are and the position they hold in your social network.

The research team plans to explore if we naturally gravitate toward people who see the world the same way we do, if we become more similar once we share experiences or if both dynamics reinforce each other.

By Elise Harris

After recently affirming his support for a Chilean bishop accused of covering up sexual abuse, Pope Francis has named a delegate to examine information that, the Vatican said, has since been brought forward.

According to a Jan. 30 Vatican statement, “following some information recently received regarding the case of Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid,” the Pope has asked Archbishop Charles J. Scicluna of Malta to travel to Santiago “to listen to those who have expressed the desire to submit items in their possession.”

In addition to overseeing the Diocese of Malta, Scicluna in 2015 was named by the Pope to oversee the doctrinal team charged with handling appeals filed by clergy accused of abuse in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Scicluna served as the congregation’s Promoter of Justice for 17 years, beginning in 1995. He is widely regarded for his expertise in the canonical norms governing allegations of sexual abuse.

The Pope’s decision to send Scicluna to Santiago follows comes after fresh controversy on the appointment arose during Pope Francis’ Jan. 15-18 visit to Chile.

Francis named Barros as head of the Osorno diocese in Chile in 2015. The move continues to draw harsh criticism from activists and abuse victims who accuse the bishop of covering up the crimes of his longtime friend, Father Fernando Karadima.

Karadima, who once led a lay movement from his parish in El Bosque, was convicted of sexually abusing minors in a 2011 Vatican trial, and at the age of 84, he was sentenced to a life of prayer and solitude.

Barros has repeatedly insisted that he knew nothing of the abuse, and Pope Francis has backed him, naming him head of the Diocese of Osorno in southern Chile in 2015.

The decision set off a wave of objections and calls for his resignation from several priests. Dozens of protesters, including non-Catholics, attempted to disrupt his March 21, 2015 installation Mass at the Osorno cathedral. However, Francis has insisted on keeping Barros in his post.

On his last day in Chile, before heading to Peru, the Pope responded to a Chilean journalist who asked about the Barros issue, saying “the day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, I’ll speak. There is not one shred of proof against him. It’s all calumny. Is that clear?”

The comment was met with uproar from Barros’ critics, several of whom are victims of Karadima’s abuse. It also prompted Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, one of the Pope’s nine cardinal advisors and head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, to release a statement saying the words were painful to victims.

When asked about it by reporters on his Jan. 21 flight back to Rome, Pope Francis apologized, saying “the word ‘proof’ was not the best in order to draw near to a suffering heart.”

He asked for forgiveness from victims he may have wounded, saying any unintentional harm he may have caused “horrified” him, especially after having met with victims in Chile and in other trips, such as his visit to Philadelphia in 2015.

“I know how much they suffer, to feel that the Pope says in their face ‘bring me a letter, proof,’ it’s a slap,” he said.

Francis also said he is aware that victims may not have brought evidence forward either because it is not available, or because they are perhaps frightened or ashamed.

He insisted that Barros’ case “was studied, it was re-studied, and there is no evidence…That is what I wanted to say. I have no evidence to condemn him. And if I condemn him without evidence or without moral certainty, I would commit the crime of a bad judge.”

“If a person comes and gives me evidence,” he said, “I am the first to listen to him. We should be just.”

An international team of scientists, led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, analyzed ancient human genomes from 38 northern Europeans dating from approximately 7,500 to 500 BCE. The study, published today in Nature Communications, found that Scandinavia was initially settled via a southern and a northern route and that the arrival of agriculture in northern Europe was facilitated by movements of farmers and pastoralists into the region.

Northern Europe could be considered a late bloomer in some aspects of human history: initial settlement by hunter-gatherers occurred only about 11,000 years ago, after the retreat of the lingering ice sheets from the Pleistocene, and while agriculture was already widespread in Central Europe 7,000 years ago, this development reached Southern Scandinavia and the Eastern Baltic only millennia later.

Several recent studies of ancient human genomes have dealt with the prehistoric population movements that brought new technology and subsistence strategies into Europe, but how they impacted the very north of the continent has still been poorly understood.

For this study, the research team, which included scientists from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia and Sweden, assembled genomic data from 38 ancient northern Europeans, from mobile hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic (approximately 12,000 to 7,000 years ago) and the first Neolithic farmers in southern Sweden (approximately 6,000 to 5,300 years ago) to the metallurgists of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Baltic (approximately 1300 to 500 BCE). This allowed the researchers to uncover surprising aspects of the population dynamics of prehistoric northern Europe.

Two routes of settlement for Scandinavia

Previous analysis of ancient human genomes has revealed that two genetically differentiated groups of hunter-gatherers lived in Europe during the Mesolithic: the so-called Western Hunter-Gatherers excavated in locations from Iberia to Hungary, and the so-called Eastern Hunter-Gatherers excavated in Karelia in north-western Russia. Surprisingly, the results of the current study show that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from Lithuania appear very similar to their Western neighbors, despite their geographic proximity to Russia. The ancestry of contemporary Scandinavian hunter-gatherers, on the other hand, was comprised from both Western and Eastern Hunter-Gatherers.

“Eastern Hunter-Gatherers were not present on the eastern Baltic coast, but a genetic component from them is present in Scandinavia. This suggests that the people carrying this genetic component took a northern route through Fennoscandia into the southern part of the Scandinavian peninsula. There they genetically mixed with Western Hunter-Gatherers who came from the South, and together they formed the Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherers,” explained Johannes Krause, Director of the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and senior author of the study.

Agriculture and animal herding – cultural imports by incoming people

Large-scale farming first started in southern Scandinavia around 6,000 years ago, about one millennium after it was already common in Central Europe. In the Eastern Baltic, the inhabitants relied solely on hunting, gathering and fishing for another 1000 years. Although some have argued that the use of the new subsistence strategy was a local development by foragers, possibly adopting the practices of their farming neighbors, the genetic evidence uncovered in the present study tells a different story.

The earliest farmers in Sweden are not descended from Mesolithic Scandinavians, but show a genetic profile similar to that of Central European agriculturalists. Thus it appears that Central Europeans migrated to Scandinavia and brought farming technology with them. These early Scandinavian farmers, like the Central European agriculturalists, inherited a substantial portion of their genes from Anatolian farmers, who first spread into Europe around 8,200 years ago and set in motion the cultural transition to agriculture known as the Neolithic Revolution.

Similarly, a near-total genetic turnover is seen in the Eastern Baltic with the advent of large-scale agro-pastoralism. While they did not mix genetically with Central European or Scandinavian farmers, beginning around 2,900 BCE the individuals in the Eastern Baltic derive large parts of their ancestry from nomadic pastoralists of the Pontic-Caspian steppe.

“Interestingly, we find an increase of local Eastern Baltic hunter-gatherer ancestry in this population at the onset of the Bronze Age,” said Alissa Mittnik of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, lead author of the study. “The local population was not completely replaced but coexisted and eventually mixed with the newcomers.”

This study emphasizes the regional differences of cultural transitions and sets the stage for more in-depth studies of later periods in northern European prehistory, such as the Iron Age and Viking Age.

The link between capitalism and drugs reaches back to the middle of the 19th century, when the British Empire forced their surplus opium crop from their South Asian colonies into the Chinese market creating massive demand from millions of addicts. In the 21st century, a similar process of deterioration has been occurring internally in the United States.

By James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya

Introduction

The link between capitalism and drugs reaches back to the middle of the 19th century, when the British Empire forced their surplus opium crop from their South Asian colonies into the Chinese market creating massive demand from millions of addicts. The Chinese government, which had banned the use and sale of opium, was alarmed at the growing social chaos created by mass addiction and went to war with the Western powers to halt the flood of drugs. Their defeat at the hands of the British and their Chinese drug lord allies opened China to massive exploitation and pillage for the next century. Chinese opium addicts were a tremendous obstacle to organizing national resistance. In essence, the British East India Company and its imperial protectors transformed China into the history’s largest ‘shithole’ – until an earth-shattering revolution broke the chains of addiction and degradation.

In the 21st century, a similar process of deterioration has been occurring internally in the United States. The ‘prescription opioid epidemic’ is ravaging American families, neighborhoods, communities, cities and states – shredding the entire fabric of US society, especially in rural, mining and former manufacturing ‘rust belt’ regions.

Hundreds of thousands of mostly working class victims have died and millions of addicts, unable to resist the destruction of their futures, have replaced a once powerful labor force.

Official government studies estimate almost 700,000 deaths since 1999, based on the scattered and incomplete coroner reports and death certificates that characterize the state of vital statistics in the US. There is no uniformity in data collection and no interest in developing a uniform national system on which to formulate social policies.

Most likely additional hundreds of thousands of drug deaths have gone un-recorded or attributed to ‘pre-existing’ medical conditions, suicides and accidents – despite clear evidence of over-prescription of narcotics and sedatives in the victims.

The US opioid epidemic accounts in large part for the ‘declining numbers of workforce participants among prime age workers’ according to Senate testimony by Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen, an Obama appointee. An estimated 15% of US construction workers suffer from substance abuse. The escalating costs of ‘Suboxone’ and other forms of narcotic addiction treatment threaten to bankrupt the health plans of several building unions. Shortages of qualified American skilled building trade workers further allow employers to push for more immigrant labor to fill the gap.

For over 2 decades the escalating numbers of opioid overdose deaths were ignored by both political parties, as well as by writers and academics of the left and right. Doctors and hospital administrators were either actively complicit or in denial. But more important the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) continued to approve manufacture, marketing and prescribing of highly addictive narcotics and sedatives to tens of millions of American patients earning the pharmaceutical industry scores of billions in profits despite the devastation. Between 1999-2014 pharmaceutical manufacturers were earning $10 billion dollars each year in profits from the sale and distribution of opiates.

In the following section, we will discuss the larger picture, including the powerful socio-economic and political forces that have profited from the addiction and killing of millions of Americans – past and present. This deliberate policy, with strong neo- Malthusian overtones, has decimated a sector of the US working class, rendered ‘surplus’ or redundant by political-economic decisions of the American ruling elite. In its wake, the prescription addiction crisis has turned large swathes of the former manufacturing and mining sectors of the US into what the current President Donald Trump would characterize as domestic ‘shitholes’ and populated by what his rival, Hillary Clinton, callously derided as ‘deplorables’. In terms of rapid loss of life and social stability, this population devastation mirrors the patterns seen in countries subjected to US/EU neo- liberal economic dictates or to US/EU imperial invasions.

The Addiction Power Elite

Today there is a public frenzy among government officials clamoring for hearings and legislation to address the opioid addiction crisis – with the usual solutions of more imprisonment, expensive private addiction treatment centers, volunteer ‘support groups’, self-help courses and educational ‘Just Say No’ campaigns. No policy maker has dared suggest educating the victims about the socio-economic trends and elite decisions that devastated their lives and communities and sent them onto the death spiral of addiction.

Recently a few leftist journalists have attacked the pharmaceutical industry, while others have cited the lack of oversight from the US-Federal Drug Administration, asking for a few tepid reforms. The former FDA Administrator David Kessler, who served under the Clinton Regime from 1990 to 1997, belatedly condemned his agency’s negligence over the mass destruction caused by unregulated prescription of powerful narcotics, which he admitted after 10 years of silence was ‘one of the biggest mistakes in the history of modern medicine’,(editorial NYT May 6, 2016).

While hundreds of thousands of Americans have been killed by opioids and hundreds more are dying every day (at least 65,000 in 2016), the US Left and the Democratic Party focus on narrow gender identity issues and cartoonish hearing over ‘Russiagate’ – Moscow’s alleged plot to seize control of the US Presidential election. While touting her experience in health care reform, Candidate Hillary Clinton deliberately ignored the opioid addiction crisis during her campaign except to characterize its largely white lower class victims as ‘deplorables’ – ignorant racists and buffoons – whom she implied deserved their misery and shortened lives.

The ‘drug epidemic’ in the US is all about the current structure of power and social relations in an increasingly oligarchic state amidst growing class inequalities and immiseration. At its roots, American capitalism in the 21st Century has degraded, impoverished and exploited US workers and employees with increasing intensity over the past two decades. Workers have lost almost all collective influence in the workplace and in politics. Working conditions and safety have deteriorated – while capitalists hire and fire at will. Salaries, pensions, health care and death benefits have been slashed or disappeared.

The deterioration of working conditions is accompanied by a marked decline in social conditions: family, neighborhood and community life has been torn asunder. Anxiety and insecurity are rampant among workers and employees. In real terms, life expectancy in the affected areas has dropped. Youth and worker suicides are skyrocketing. Maternal and child mortality are up. American youth are 70% more likely to die before adulthood than their counterparts in other rich countries. In 2016, death rates for millennials (ages 25-34) rose to 129/100,000, with 35/100,000 deaths due to narcotic overdose. The carnage surpasses the height of the US AIDS epidemic in the 1980’s. Rural and small town child protective services are well beyond the breaking point with the neglected and orphaned children of addicts. Neonatal intensive care units are overwhelmed by the number of infants born into life threatening acute opiate withdrawal crises due to their mothers’ addiction. Despite this grim picture, taxes for the rich are being slashed and public services decimated.

Meanwhile, the income gap between the working class and the oligarchs has widened and a sharp class-defined health care and educational apartheid has emerged. Children of the upper 20% have exclusive, privileged access to elite universities based on family and ethnic ties. Elite families, who have no need for ‘health insurance’ have access to the most thorough and advanced medical services in the world. No physician would dream of irresponsibly prescribing narcotics to a family member of an oligarch.

These inequalities are deeply entrenched: Working people in the areas affected by the opioid epidemic receive only cursory and inadequate, if not incompetent, care from physician assistants and over-burdened nurses. They are subjected to long waits in deteriorating emergency rooms and rarely see a physician. Virtually none have regular family physicians. If they are injured or suffer from pain, they are prescribed long courses and large amounts of narcotic pain killers – opioids, instead of the safer, but more expensive physical therapy and non-addictive medications. This has occurred with the approval of the FDA. Even rural high school students with sports injuries would receive narcotics, despite the well-known increased susceptibility to addiction among youth. Politically powerful ‘pain lobbies’, funded by the giant pharmaceutical corporation, have pushed this trend for over two decades creating huge profits for the billionaire pharmaceutical executives.

The opioid killing fields of America have their origins and logic in the convergence of several inter-related features of US capitalism. This was due to the relentless pursuit of profits for the corporations and elite, while turning the deindustrialized and agricultural parts of the country into domestic ‘Third Worlds’.

First, the capitalist class cut the production costs by limiting access to quality health care for labor to increase their profits. In the US this has led to millions of workers depending on cheap and available prescription narcotics. Employer-provided insurance companies routinely deny more costly non-narcotic treatment for injured workers and insist on prescribing cheap opioids to get the workers back on the job.

Cheap opioids were tolerated by union health plans in the beginning to save money, while union bosses looked the other way as thousands of workers became addicts.
Secondly, capitalists freely fire workers who are injured at work and seek treatment, forcing workers to avoid sick leave and to rely even more on opioids, like Oxy-Contin, which ‘Big Pharma’ falsely marketed as non-addictive.

Thirdly, capitalists profit immensely from the premature deaths by overdose and related preventable causes among older workers because this lowers pension costs and health insurance payments. Wall Street has brazenly celebrated the billions of dollars of pension and health care liabilities saved by the shortened life expectancy among US workers. The drop in life expectancy and rise in premature death in the US resembles the pattern seen in Russia during the first decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the rampant pillage by the US-backed mafia oligarchs under Boris Yeltsin.

Fourthly, capitalists are free to hire young replacement workers (eighteen to thirty years old) as temporary labor at lower wages and without any benefits. They are subject to the insecurities of contingent employment, as part of the ‘gig economy’ (outsourcing to ‘self-employed’ workers and employees). These overstressed workers, with no future, turn to opioids to overcome physical pain and emotional stress – until they drop out as slaves to addiction. This is the main reason for the declining numbers of young workers available in the US – despite relatively high employment levels.

Fifthly, and to add a morbid insult to injury, the opioid death epidemic has been a bonanza for the tissue and organ transplant industry, where ‘materials’ harvested from young overdose victims, including bones, skin, cornea, tendons, heart valves, teeth and blood vessels are worth tens of thousands of dollars per corpse. Organs harvested from brain-dead overdose victims are valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And harvest companies and tissue brokers hover around hospital emergency rooms like carrion birds waiting for news of new victims – often contacting next of kin before the authorities. This bizarre profiting from the completely preventable domestic deaths of US capitalism recalls Jonathan Swift’s satiric ‘Modest Proposal’ for British entrepreneurs to harvest the skin of the Irish Potato Famine victims to make commercial items, like ladies’ purses!

In sum, the structure and relations of contemporary US capitalism is the general cause and beneficiary of the opioid epidemic. The inevitable result is a rapid destruction of communities marginalized by capitalist decisions. This has benefited capital by culling the surplus, and potentially restive, population in a manner reminiscent of the British Empire during the famines in India in the previous two centuries. Social Darwinism and Neo-Malthusian rationales proliferate among the oligarchs, politicians, medical professionals and even seep into the language used by the public (‘survival of the fittest’) providing the ideological justification for the carnage.

Specific Operative Power Elites Driving the Epidemic

Multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical corporations manufacture and market narcotics and highly addictive sedatives. Their agents manipulate the medical community and lobby among the politicians for a ‘pain-free’ America.

The producer of the leading commercial ‘gateway’ into addiction, Oxy-Contin, is Purdue Pharmaceuticals. The company was founded and run entirely by the Sackler family under the leadership of the recently deceased Raymond Sackler and his brothers. The Sacklers were of Eastern European Jewish origins and have close ties with Israel. They started by manufacturing laxatives and ear wax, then introducing the highly addictive tranquilizer, Valium, to finally producing and pushing the most profitable prescription drug in history, Oxy-Contin in the 1990’s, during President Bill Clinton’s ‘health care reform’ administration.

The Sacklers set up an aggressive large-scale sales force to convince physicians that their product was not addictive. They paid physician-researchers to publish fraudulent data on the safety of Oxy-Contin. These experts-for- hire in the burgeoning pain industry received huge fees to peddle Sackler’s products. They peddled the notion of American patients enjoying a completely ‘pain free’ existence – touting the value of the highly subjective ‘pain scale’ as the fifth vital sign in the assessment of all patients. The ‘pain scale’ never caught on in other wealthy countries, where objective assessment remained the primary basis for diagnosis and therapy. Interestingly, the ‘pain scale’ has been less frequently used with African American and Hispanic patients, due largely to an inherent racism in US medicine that views minorities as potential addicts and unreliable with prescribed narcotics. As a result, African American and Hispanic patients were largely spared the prescription narcotic addiction epidemic – where over 95% of overdose deaths were white, mostly working class. It was also evident that African American patients presenting to emergency rooms in severe pain receive far less care than their white compatriots – even when their pain is a symptom of a serious life-threatening medical or surgical emergency.

The Sackler family’s net worth rose to over $14 billion dollars, according the Forbes billionaires listing, while Purdue Pharmaceuticals reaped over $35 billion dollars in profit from Oxy-Contin. Prescription murder and addiction elevated the Sackler’s to the political, cultural and oligarch elite.

The Sackler’s became major collectors of fine art and patrons of the arts and sciences in New York, London, and Tel Aviv. New York’s glitterati swooned over Raymond and Queen Elizabeth awarded him a knighthood. Meanwhile scores of thousands of prescription addicts died each year and millions sunk into addiction, ill health and degradation, dragging their communities with them.

Following Sackler’s example, other pharma billionaires joined the slaughter, the deaths and mayhem multiplied. Opioid pain medication was so cheap to produce and had created its own ever-expanding demand as teenagers raided grandmother’s medicine cabinet in search of narcotics and poor workers lined up at ‘pill mills’. Oxy-Contin and its siblings produced the highest profit margin in pharmaceutical history – far exceeding the so-called block-buster drugs.

The totally preventable and predictable devastation eventually led to Purdue Pharmaceuticals being fined $634.5 million dollars in 2007 for fraudulently covering up the addiction and overdose potential of Oxy-Contin. The political influence of the Sackler family protected their members from any accusation of misconduct or criminal conspiracy. Their influence in elite political and judicial circles was unparalleled.

Oxy-Contin and other addictive drugs are still being mass produced, massively prescribed and are contributing to the death of over 65,000 workers each year. In response to the recent crack-down on prescriptions of narcotics, millions of addicts have transitioned to cheap street heroin and the dangerously potent illegal fentanyl to feed their craving. Physicians provided the gateway to a life of street addiction, violence and eventually death – while authorities throughout the United States deliberately looked away.

The second operative power elite are the medical professionals who prescribed the drugs in an irresponsible and callous manner to millions of American over the past 2-3 decades. They too have been largely spared by the political and judicial system and even remain the ‘pillars’ of local communities ravaged by drug addiction.

For two thousand years, a guiding moral and professional principle in medicine had been to ‘first do no harm’ in the course of treating a patient. There has been a huge difference in the way working class and elite patients are treated in the US. Thousands of physicians and other medical professionals ignored the obvious addiction and deaths among their lower and middle class patients and succumbed to bribes and greed to promote opioids. Millions of patients and their family members have been betrayed by this grotesque failure to address the addiction crisis. The economic changes in medicine pressured many doctors in corporate medicine to rush patients in and out of their offices with only cursory examinations and prescriptions for multiple narcotics and sedatives. Physicians allowed the for-profit goals of their corporate employers to dictate how they served their patients – thereby betraying the sacred trust. Many physicians relied on poorly supervised and over-worked physician assistants and nurse practitioners to diagnose and treat patients – already addicted to narcotics. It is easier and cheaper to write a prescription than to thoroughly examine and properly treat a low income patient. All accepted the corporate and capitalist ideology that the addicts were the regrettable victims of their own inherent moral or genetic degeneracy.

The chain of causation went from systemic capitalist profiteering to billionaire pharmaceutical corporations to hospital enterprises to doctors and their poorly supervised staff.

The principal political accomplice of death by addiction is the federal government and elected representatives who accepted scores of millions of dollars in ‘donations’ from the pharmaceutical lobby.

The President and Congress, Democrats and Republicans ignored the epidemic because they were bought off by their campaign donor-owners at ‘Big Pharma’, the term used to describe the powerful pharmaceutical industry and its lobby. Over the past twenty years, the political elite received many millions of dollars in campaign funds from Big Pharma lobbies – including politicians from states ravaged by prescription narcotics.

The Federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) allowed the overuse and distribution of narcotics and then ignored the terrible consequences for over 20 years. One cannot imagine US veterinarians and their regulators noting the drug deaths of 3,000 family pets without quickly identifying and correcting the situation, while the FDA, DEA and US elite ‘ignored’ the deaths of hundreds of thousands of poor and working class Americans.

Finally, after two decades, local politicians and state attorneys general saw a new potential source of revenue with lawsuits against the offending drug companies and major distributors. Some senators have sponsored hearings but no decisive action has been taken over the carnage among the poor civilian population. In 2010, the Pentagon and Senate Armed Services committee held hearings on the huge increase in prescription drug abuse overdose deaths among US military personnel and have taken some effective measures to address the issue. At that time, US senators in the hearings warned jokingly about the perils of upsetting ‘Big Pharma’. Clearly, unlike the generals who need healthy soldiers, US capitalist and politicians have had no interest in protecting working class citizens – given the overall profits their addiction and deaths bring to the elite.

Conclusion: What is to be Done?

The prescription narcotic and subsequent illegal narcotic addiction epidemic has become a million-person killing field – sowing havoc in the poor and marginalized, de- industrialized working class communities of the US. However the victims and their executioners, the merchants of death, all have a name and location within the capitalist system. The logic and the consequences are clear.

Most victims are working class, poor and lower middle class, and overwhelmingly white: the low paid, young and old, the insecure and under employed, and especially those without adequate or competent health care.

Over 5 million are afflicted by prescription drug abuse or at least started on the road to addiction via prescription narcotics. This is a truly American Holocaust leaving multi- million family survivors. Scores of thousands of children are living with elderly relatives or swept up into foster homes and the over-burdened child welfare system.

The executioners and their accomplices have become rich, elite college-educated patrons of the most sophisticated arts and sciences. They receive the best health care services in the world; rely on docile but highly educated servants, nannies and cooks – many of whom are immigrant. Most of all, they enjoy immunity from public censor and prosecution. They are the politically well connected, perfectly dressed, manicured, be- knighted dealers of death and despair.

The addiction crisis is a part of the class war waged by the upper class against the middle and lower classes of this country. The real, if not stated, consequence of their trade has been to cull the population rendered superfluous by elite economic and political decisions and to destroy the capacity of millions of their victims, family members, neighbors and friends to understand, organize, unify and fight back against the onslaught for their own class interests. Here is where we find a basis to approach a solution.

There are historical precedents for the successful elimination of drug lords, both elite and criminal and for bringing addicts back to productive social life.

We begin with the case of China: After a century of British-imposed opium addiction, the Chinese revolution of 1949 took charge in arresting, prosecuting and executing the war-lord opium “entrepreneurs”. Millions of addicts were rehabilitated and returned to their communities, joining the workforce to build a new society.

Likewise, the 1959 Cuban revolution smashed the drug dens and brothels run by brutal Cuban gangster oligarchs and death squad-leaders, together with American mafia bosses, like Meyer Lansky. These thugs and parasites were forced to flee to Miami, Palermo and Tel Aviv.

The first step in an effective class-conscious drug war in the US would require the organization of mass movements, dedicated anti-drug lawyers, physicians, medical personnel and community organizers, as well as brave well-integrated educators and community leaders. A truly involved national Center for Disease Control, not a mouthpiece for the corporate elite, would be re-organized to collect quality national data on the scope and nature of the problem and provide further bases for reversing the trends of decreased life expectancy, increase child and maternal mortality and epidemic preventable-premature deaths among workers.

The second step would involve taking control of the prescription of narcotics limited to the narrow indications recognized in other industrialized countries (intractable cancer pain or short term post-operative pain management) and developing a national data base to track the prescription practice of physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and others. Those unwilling to reform their practice would face arrest and severe prosecution. Heath care would be patient centered, not profit oriented and the dictum ‘Primum non nocere’ would replace callous Social-Darwinism and greed in medical practice.

The manufacturers and distributors, as well as the lobbyists and merchants of deadly opioids, would be forced to pay for the devastation and face prosecution.

The process of restoring viability to drug-ravaged domestic ‘shit-holes’ created by the US capitalist elite finally would require attacking and transforming the economic roots of the addiction crisis. It would require replacing a system that sows pain and suffering among the workers with one where the workers and their communities finally take control of their lives. Professionals and intellectuals, rather than viewing the victims from the point of view of the elite decision-makers, will have to fully integrate their interests with those of the masses.

Successful local struggles can build the political power base that transforms ‘studies’ and ‘critiques’ to direct action and electoral changes.

Outlawing this revolting source of profit and scourge of thousands of communities can weaken the power of the billionaire drug dealers and their political allies.

Millions of lives are at stake, they have their survival to win. Understanding the root of this class centered affliction and mobilizing to reverse this trend can have major consequences benefiting the widely dispersed imperial and capital induced shit-holes of the world!

SECRETARY TILLERSON: Well, good morning, all. And the United States is very pleased to host this inaugural U.S.-Qatar Strategic Dialogue. I want to welcome Foreign Minister al-Thani, Minister of Defense al-Atiyah, and the entire Qatari delegation to Washington. And I want to express my thanks and appreciation to Secretary Mattis for joining us for this dialogue as well.

Qatar is a strong partner and a longtime friend of the United States. We value the U.S.-Qatar relationship and hope the talks today deepen our strategic ties. In today’s Strategic Dialogue sessions, we will discuss important areas of cooperation, including trade and investment, security, counterterrorism, energy, and aviation. The United States believes enhanced trade will contribute positively to both our countries’ economic development, and create jobs for the American people and Qatari citizens while furthering the region’s security and stability.

The United States welcomes the understandings we reached on civil aviation yesterday. These exchanges addressed concerns important to U.S. aviation industry stakeholders and strengthened our economic cooperation. The President has made this matter a priority, and the outcome we achieve will ensure a level playing field in the global aviation market.

I’m also pleased to announce that the U.S. and Qatari governments will sign a memorandum of understanding that creates a framework for the United States to provide technical assistance and training to the Qatari Government on combatting human trafficking. This MOU also provides for the creation of a bilateral government working group to discuss labor practices in Qatar. Through our continued cooperation, we hope to partner with Qatar to build institutional capacity to eliminate human trafficking, an area in which Qatar has already made significant strides.

With respect to counterterrorism, following President Trump’s challenge to all of our Gulf partners during the Riyadh summit last year, Qatar has made significant progress to improve efforts to combat terrorism. As a result of the memorandum of understanding our countries signed in July, the United States and Qatar have increased information sharing on terrorists and terrorist financiers. We have participated in counterterrorism technical training and taken steps to improve aviation security. We look forward to building on this foundation and implementing next steps.

We will also discuss other critical regional security issues, including the ongoing battle to defeat ISIS, Daesh, the Gulf dispute, the situation in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Iran’s role in the region. As the Gulf dispute nears the eight-month mark, the United States remains as concerned today as we were at its outset. This dispute has had direct negative consequences economically and militarily for those involved, as well as the United States. We are concerned by the rhetoric and propaganda employed in the region, playing out daily in Arab mainstream and social media.

It is critical that all parties minimize rhetoric, exercise restraint to avoid further escalation, and work toward a resolution. A united GCC bolsters our effectiveness on many fronts, particularly on counterterror – countering terrorism, defeating ISIS, and countering the spread of Iran’s malign influence.

The United States and Qatar will be signing three documents today outlining our cooperation in the important bilateral and regional areas mentioned, including three at this ceremony.

The first is a memorandum of understanding that establishes the convention for this U.S.-Qatar Strategic Dialogue on an annual basis going forward, so that we can continue to build on the close partnership between our two countries.

The second document is a joint declaration outlining the United States cooperation with Qatar on matters of shared regional and security interests.

The third document is a memorandum of understanding that creates a framework for the cooperation between the United States and Qatar to combat human trafficking.

I look forward to the outcomes of today’s inaugural U.S.-Qatar Strategic Dialogue and our continued collaboration over the years to come. And with that, I’d welcome remarks from Foreign Minister al-Thani.

FOREIGN MINISTER AL-THANI: Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Good morning, dear friend Secretary Tillerson, dear friend Secretary Mattis, your excellencies member of the two delegations of the U.S.-Qatar Strategic Dialogue, ladies and gentlemen. I am delighted to express on behalf of the Qatari delegation our deepest gratitude for the warm welcome. This year we are celebrating the 45th anniversary of the U.S.-Qatar alliance. Our work today represents a milestone in a historically deep and continuous relationship between Qatar and the United States in defense, economic, education, and political unions.

Holding this immensely significant first session of Qatar-U.S. Strategic Dialogue come as an expression and a celebration of the enduring and the close affiliation between our two countries. In a recent January phone call between the President of United States Donald Trump and His Highness the Emir of Qatar, there – they have emphasized their mutual determination to strengthen the bilateral relation. A number of major agreements will be signed today covering defense, trade, investment, and energy – all area where Qatar is committed to investing in America’s economy.

Qatar is already investing more than $100 billion in the U.S. economy, including $10 billion earmarked for infrastructure. Qatar and U.S. private sector have devoted substantial resources to the other, U.S. companies doing business in Qatar within construction, energy, and services industry. Qatari companies are investing in the U.S. financial services, health care, and technology markets.

From Qatar hosting six prominent U.S. universities in our education city, to Qatar investment in the LNG Golden Pass in Texas, our countries have shared interests – interests that translate into job opportunities for the American and Qatari people. To make all these investments flourish, regional security is essential. So today we will also discuss a range of security issues, including shared threats and further opportunities of regional cooperation.

This joint endeavor take place despite the difficult circumstances that Qatar currently faces as a part of a larger regional crisis taking place in the Middle East. The state of Qatar and its people have been illegally and unjustifiably blockaded. This blockade disrupts the joint efforts in providing stabilities for the – stability for the region. Let me express my profound gratitude for the effort of the President Trump, the U.S. Congress, and Secretaries Tillerson and Mattis and Mnuchin in taking a just position on the illegal activities of the blockading states throughout this Gulf crisis. We look forward to our continued cooperation on regional security to deliver long-lasting peace and security for the Middle East.

In addition to security, both countries are committing to improving labor standards and joining forces to stop all forms of human trafficking. Qatar and U.S. are committed to delivering justice to our citizens.

In closing, I reiterate my appreciation for your effort to ensure that this first round of the Strategic Dialogue will be held successfully. We look forward to hosting the second round in Doha next year. Our mutual goal is to deepen strategic bonds between our two countries and go forward together to yield the greatest mutual benefit. Thank you.

SECRETARY MATTIS: Excuse me. Secretary Tillerson, thank you for hosting this inaugural Qatar-United States Security Dialogue with our counterparts, Foreign Minister al-Thani and my friend, the Minister of State for Defense al-Atiyah. The United States enjoys a longstanding defense relationship with Qatar. A strong and valued military partner, Qatar is a longtime friend in the region. Even in the midst of its own current challenges, Qatar and the United States maintain excellent military-to-military relations, hosting Al Udeid Air Base, home to our Combined Air Operations Center, the United States Air Force Central Command Forward Headquarters, and U.S. Central Command’s Forward Headquarters, providing critical counterterrorism support to the Defeat ISIS/Defeat Daesh coalition and President Trump’s South Asia strategy.

We are grateful to Qatar for their longstanding support of America’s present and continuing commitment to regional security, a commitment that includes information sharing and counterterrorism training. It should be noted that just this last week, the Qatari Air Force completed its first two C-17 flights from the Gulf to Afghanistan and back, providing logistical support to the NATO counterterrorism campaign in Afghanistan. As Secretary Tillerson stated, a united Gulf Cooperation Council bolsters our effectiveness on many fronts, particularly on countering terrorism, defeating ISIS/Daesh, and countering the spread of Iran’s malign influence. It is thus critical that the GCC recovers its cohesion as the proud Gulf nations return to mutual support through a peaceful resolution that provides for enhanced regional stability and prosperity.

I look forward to a lasting Qatar-U.S. security relationship, a relationship that will continue to bolster our efforts against common security threats and violent extremism. So thank you, and Minister al-Atiyah.

DEFENSE MINISTER AL-ATIYAH: Secretary Tillerson and General Mattis, thank you. Distinguished colleague, I reaffirm the remark raised by Sheikh Mohammed regarding our special relation with the U.S. Qatar and the United States have long enjoyed special relationship, a relationship built on a mutual respect and trust. We have stood together many time in the face of tyranny, fought those who defied the rule of law, and walked jointly to confront the complex and expensive challenges that face our region today.

The relationship extend beyond the security, defense, and political. It extend in the educational, as Sheikh Mohammed said, energy sector, commerce, and social tie. I speak of the special relation that we share with our friend and allies here in the United States, and there is no better way to demonstrate the uniqueness of this relation than by looking at our military-to-military partnership.

As some of you are acutely aware, Qatar and the United States have been strategic military allies for quite some time now. We have shared our friend burden and have carried on our own weight in the effort to bring peace, justice, and stability to our region and beyond. This integral meeting marks an important moment in our relationship with our friend here in the U.S. We look forward to building on the existing infrastructure of our historic and strategic relationship through exploring a way in which we are able to expand our bilateral coordination and further our effort to – in realizing our shared objective of peace, security and prosperity for our nation and beyond.

The state of Qatar has never waived its commitment to stand with friends and allies, especially when the – when they needed us the most. When other in the region were no longer able to accommodate U.S. present of their soil, Qatar eased restriction and expedited its offer to host its ally. Al Udeid airbase, which currently hosts 11,000 of your brave men and women, has been at the epicenter of the global fight against terrorism. Qatar has spared no effort in increasing the readiness and efficiency of Al Udeid operation by investing billions of dollar in the direct infrastructure and maintenance of the strategic airbase.

We are looking toward the future of our military partnership with the United States as we plan for the year ahead. Qatar and its trusted ally have reaffirmed their commitment toward the stability and prosperity of both nation. The recent purchased of the F-15s fighter jets signal a new era of cooperation. This strategic bird will assure our readiness to protect our own border and aid our allies further in our collective fight toward peace and stability. Creation of tens of thousand of jobs directs – new jobs, and ten of thousand more of indirect creation job.

The initiative has been jointly constructed – ensure – and I’m referring to the military initiative which we are looking to achieve in Qatar, and we call the 2040 one – has been jointly constructed to ensure the safety of the forces serving in Al Udeid and facilitate future capacity building by alleviating the classification of Al Udeid to permanent U.S. base. The cooperative initiative will include the exchange of military personnel and the expansion of Al Udeid airbase, and include on-base housing for the American service member and their families, new state-of-the-art schools, as well as building quality recreational entertainment and service facility. Qatar has demonstrated its commitment to well-being of the community of American service member in Al Udeid and their family who serves alongside them by facilitating for needs. The initiative aim to serve the needs of the community living in Al Udeid and ease their transition and assimilation.

In the current Gulf conflict, the disruption of CT offered the stabilizing allied forces’ effort in the region. Brave men and women of Qatar, since our inception, there has been those who wish to impose their domain over us. Qatar did not waver then and it will not waver now. And to protect the sovereignty and fight of its independence, the brave people of Qatar stood firmly with their leader in face of the mounting hostility directed toward their country. They refused to be manipulated or used as a pawn in an arbitrary and pointless conflict. We are here today to work for these men and women, and for the men and women of your great country, to explore economic, social, military and social opportunity that would progress our effort toward prosperity and stability. Thank you. Thank you, sir.

SECRETARY TILLERSON: Thank you very much for those opening statements, and I think now we’re going to sign the three memorandums.

At the US-Qatar Strategic Dialogue held Tuesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Foreign Minister Mohammed Al Thani welcomed the outcome of recent discussions on civil aviation aimed at ensuring a level playing field in the global aviation sector while maintaining the Open Skies framework of U. international aviation policy.

On January 29, US and Qatari delegations reached a set of Understandings to address concerns that US carriers have raised with respect to government support of Qatar’s flagship carrier, Qatar Airways.

Anchored in the two countries’ close bilateral economic and strategic relationship, the Understandings represent a set of important, high-level political commitments, the US State Department said, adding that they affirm both governments’ intention to promote best practices for marketplace participation by their airlines providing scheduled passenger service under the 2001 U.S.-Qatar Air Transport Agreement.

On the vital issue of financial transparency, in the coming year, those airlines should issue public annual reports with financial statements audited externally in accordance with internationally-recognized accounting standards, to the extent they are not already doing so. Within two years, those airlines should publicly disclose significant new transactions with state-owned enterprises and take steps to ensure that such transactions are based on commercial terms. Officials plan to meet again bilaterally in one year to discuss progress.

The above outcome is a result of the effort led by the Department of State to address concerns about subsidized competition and a lack of transparency.

“We are maintaining the Open Skies framework, which continues to yield real benefits for U.S. airlines, airports, labor, the travel industry, and consumers, among others. Our goal is to provide beneficial results for as many U.S. stakeholders as possible,” the State Department said in a statement.

EIA expects that U.S. average household expenditures for heating oil and propane for the 2017–18 winter will be higher than last winter according to the January Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO).

Compared with last year, higher crude oil prices and lower inventory levels are putting upward pressure on the prices for heating fuels (Figure 1). In addition, forecasts for a colder winter than last year—one of the warmest on record for much of the United States—are expected to increase heating fuel consumption. As a result of increased prices and higher consumption, EIA expects average household expenditures for heating oil and propane to increase from last year’s levels.

Temperatures this winter, based on the forecast of heating degree days from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, are expected to be colder than last winter with approximately 10% more heating degree days.

Nevertheless, this winter is expected to be slightly warmer than normal with 2% fewer heating degree days than the 10-year average (Figure 2).

U.S. total distillate inventories, which include all sulfur levels of distillate, for the winter heating season (October through March) were 23 million barrels (15%) below 2016 inventories at the beginning of October and remained nearly 30 million barrels (18%) below 2017 levels as of January 12.

Since October 2017, U.S. winter inventories of ULSD have remained between 12% and 16% below the previous year’s inventory levels for the same period. The continued transition to the use of ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) for heating has increased the relevance of assessing ULSD inventories for heating fuels. Reliance on heating oil is highest in the Northeast—Petroleum Administration for Defense District (PADD) 1—where about 21% of households in the region use oil for space heating. ULSD inventory levels in the region were nearly 49% below 2017 levels as of January 19, and total distillate inventory levels were nearly 34% below last year’s levels.

Strong exports of distillate, some of which can be used as home heating oil, are contributing to lower inventories. Since the beginning of October 2017, exports (based on a four-week moving average) have exceeded those during the same time last winter for 13 out of 15 weeks. U.S. demand for distillate remained relatively stable in 2017 through October, with EIA’s proxy for demand, product supplied, fluctuating between 2% lower than and 6% higher than 2016 levels.

Higher crude oil prices are also contributing to heating fuel price increases. The Brent crude oil price is the most influential crude oil price in determining U.S. petroleum product prices. For the week ending January 12, the Brent crude oil price was $69.47 per barrel (b), more than $15/b higher than the same time last year. EIA forecasts that the price of Brent will average $61/b this winter, which is more than $9/b higher than last winter (Figure 3).

As of January 15, the U.S. average residential retail heating oil price was $3.21 per gallon (gal), 58 cents higher than at the same time last year. The January STEO forecasts that the price for heating oil in the 2017–18 winter season will average $2.79/gal, 40 cents higher than the previous year. Consumption per household is forecast to increase by 7% to 553 gallons. As a result of both higher forecast prices and consumption, EIA expects households that heat primarily with heating oil will spend an average of $1,570 this winter, $323 more than last winter.

Increases in EIA’s projected household expenditures on propane vary by region. EIA expects that households heating with propane in the Northeast (PADD 1) will spend an average of $2,246 this winter, $256 (13%) more than last winter. These increased expenditures combine a 6% increase in consumption and a 7% increase in the fuel price. EIA expects households heating with propane in the Midwest (PADD 2) will spend $1,466 on average, $291 (25%) more than last winter, reflecting 12% increases in both propane prices and consumption.

U.S. propane inventories at the beginning of October were 78.9 million barrels, 25 million barrels below inventories at the beginning of winter last year. As of January 19, inventories were 54 million barrels, 14.2 million barrels below the same time last year. The Midwest, which is the region most reliant on propane for heating and agricultural purposes, began this winter with inventories slightly below last year’s levels. Strong global demand for propane has provided export opportunities, and weekly U.S. exports (based on a four-week average) of propane have exceeded last year’s volumes in 11 of the 15 weeks so far this winter.

U.S. average regular gasoline price increases, diesel price declines

The U.S. average regular gasoline retail price rose 1 cent from the previous week to $2.57 per gallon on January 22, 2018, up 24 cents from the same time last year. East Coast gasoline prices increased nearly four cents to $2.56 per gallon, Gulf Coast prices increased over three cents to $2.31 per gallon, Rocky Mountain prices increased nearly two cents $2.47 per gallon, and West Coast prices increased over one cent to $3.02 per gallon. Midwest prices fell nearly four cents to $2.47 per gallon.

The U.S. average diesel fuel price fell less than 1 cent, remaining at $3.03 per gallon on January 22, 2018, 46 cents higher than a year ago. Rocky Mountain prices dropped nearly three cents to $2.96 per gallon, Midwest and Gulf Coast prices each fell by one cent to $2.97 per gallon and $2.82 per gallon, respectively, and West Coast prices fell less than one cent, remaining at $3.40 per gallon. East Coast prices rose nearly two cents to $3.08 per gallon.

Residential heating oil prices flat, propane prices increase

As of January 22, 2018, residential heating oil prices averaged $3.21 per gallon, virtually unchanged from last week but 58 cents per gallon higher than last year’s price at this time. The average wholesale heating oil price for this week averaged $2.20 per gallon, almost 3 cents per gallon less than last week but nearly 50 cents per gallon higher than a year ago.

Residential propane prices averaged almost $2.61 per gallon, over 2 cents per gallon more than last week and 25 cents per gallon higher than a year ago. Wholesale propane prices averaged $1.28 per gallon, nearly 6 cents per gallon more than last week and almost 39 cents per gallon higher than last year’s price.

Propane inventories decline

U.S. propane stocks decreased by 4.0 million barrels last week to 54.0 million barrels as of January 19, 2018, 11.1 million barrels (17.1%) lower than the five-year average inventory level for this same time of year. Midwest, East Coast, Gulf Coast, and Rocky Mountain/West Coast inventories decreased by 1.4 million barrels, 1.2 million barrels, 1.1 million barrels, and 0.4 million barrels, respectively. Propylene non-fuel-use inventories represented 4.9% of total propane inventories.

Vladimir Putin’s much-ballyhooed pro-natalist policies including maternal capital and monthly subsidies for families giving birth to a first child have failed to stop Russia’s demographic decline, with the number of newborns falling by 203,000 in 2017 to 1,690,000, a 10.7 percent decline, according to Rosstat data.

This was the worst decline in the last decade, experts say; and the number of births fell in all regions of the country with the exception of Chechnya, the product of underlying demographic trends that government policies have done little or nothing to change (ura.news/articles/1036273714).

Anatoly Vishnevsky, director of the Institute of Demography of the Higher School of Economics, says that the declines this year were no surprise to the expert community. The number of women of reproductive age has fallen dramatically, the echo of the low number of births in the early 1990s.

According to him, “it is impossible to change this situation significantly.” Moreoveer, “the demographic measures the state has undertaken to a large extent affect” when people have children but not how many they have. Thus, maternal capital or subsidies may cause people to have children in order to get the money but not to have more which is what the regime wants.

Indeed, most officials recognize this reality. Labor and Social Policy Minister Maksim Topilin, for example, warned last year that in the immediate future, “the number of women of reproductive age will fall by a quarter or even more.” Unless birthrates jumped upward – and they are moving in the opposite direction – the number of children will continue to fall.

Thus, part of the decline reflects the echoes of earlier demographic problems, such as the smaller number of women born during the war, then 20 years later and so on. But Olga Ivanova, the head of the Center for the Resolution of Social Conflicts, says that the situation has been made worse by the current economic crisis and cutbacks in medical and social services.

Sergey Rybalchenko, who advises the government on demography, observes that “polls show that the present demographic measures taken by the state are clearly insufficient. Yes, the initiatives promoted by the head of state work but they must be broadened” if Russia is to avoid demographic disaster.

In particular, he continues, the government needs to provide more support for people with larger families. Otherwise, most Russians will decide not to have more children lest the burden of raising them pushes them into poverty. Among the steps to help them should be a radical expansion of child care facilities.

Russians do not rush into having children without reflection, Konstantin Dolinin of the Parent’s Assembly says. They calculate what having them will mean to their own prospects. Now, they can see that people with four or five children are far more likely to end up poor than those with one or even none.

Igor Beloborodov of the Independent Institute of the Family and Demography is even more blunt: the state can’t “buy more children.” If it tries, it will fail or produce results that it may now want, as is the case now. Maternal capital and child subsidies are boosting the birthrates significantly only in non-Russian republics, thus changing the Russia’s ethnic balance.

The U.S. State Department announced that starting from Tuesday, January 30, Washington would be able to impose sanctions against foreign companies or people for “significant transactions with persons in the defense and intelligence sectors of the Russian government,” TASS reports.

According to Kommersant, the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Treasury provided Congress with a “secret report” on the sanctions, but they are not going to make the information public.

Starting from January 29, the State Department may begin imposing sanctions in accordance with section 231 of the America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) for significant transactions by organizations from the Russian defense or intelligence sectors. According to the explanations by State Department Spokeswoman Heather Nauert, it became clear that no one specifically would be penalized yet, the newspaper wrote. The State Department believes that the fear of coming under American sanctions will make foreigners refrain from cooperating with Russia on its own.

According to a top manager in one of Russia’s defense industry enterprises, the sanctions “almost guarantee” problems with the means of delivering products to customers – for example, a ship for transporting weapons chartered from a third party can only operate under a Russian flag (since it transports the product with the label “top secret” ).

Armenia and Azerbaijan have signed military cooperation contracts with Russia.

Azerbaijan has already bought Russian weapons, ammunition and military equipment for some $5 billion, while shipments are still underway. The two countries are currently working on a new contract.

Armenia, in turn, is constantly building up its armed forces with Russian weapons and equipment. Yerevan and Moscow signed a $200 million loan deal for purchasing armaments and have already agreed on a new $100 million lean deal.

India can offer an alternative model aligned with the “open economy, freedom, democracy” matrix, if it can boost its tax to GDP ratio to generate the resources required for sharing growth.

By Sanjeev Ahluwalia

Put it down to the heavy snow in Davos or to a rare case of blunt honesty by an international agency. Whilst sharing the good news of the revival of the world economy in 2017 and its expected continued growth till 2019 at 3.9%, Christine Laggard — the IMF Managing Director, cautioned that 20% of the developing world was not part of that revival, tinging the WEF celebrations with sobriety.

India’s angst is real with growth dropping to 6.5%, versus the 7% plus real growth of recent years. We are new to this business of high growth. The two decades from 1980 to 2000 only had a growth rate of 5.7% per year. It is only post 2000 that a growth rate of 7% per year become part of our expectations. In comparison, China’s high growth period of 8 plus percent per year — with minor annual deviations — began in 1977 and continued for over three decades till 2011.

The 1970s and 1980s were a good time to grow. Under the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) the Kennedy, Tokyo and Uruguay rounds of negotiations (1963 to 1993) reduced average tariffs from 22% to 5%. World exports as a share of world GDP increased by 40% between 1972 to 1982 (from a level of 14% of world GDP to 19%). Over the next two decades, till 2002, world exports further increased by nearly one third to a level of 25% of world GDP. The bulk of Chinese growth happened during this period of trade liberalisation.

For India 1962 to 1982 were decades lost to domestic political headwinds. We liberalised, tentatively, from 1985. But reform put down roots only from 1992. By then world growth had tapered off. During the quarter century after 1992 till 2016, only in four years, did the world grow at 4% per year or more. In the quarter century before 1992 there were 14 years when growth exceeded 4% per year with 1964 being the high point at 6.7%. India has struggled against the declining trend in world growth to pull itself up. Fresh challenges can be expected over the next decade.

The world grew rapidly using the “open economy” model over fifty years till 2008. Is it now broken? And did rising inequality within economies kill it? And are we now left only with the long, dark alley of “directed Chinese capitalism”, as a viable “growth model”?

India can offer an alternative model aligned with the “open economy, freedom, democracy” matrix, if we can boost our tax to GDP ratio to generate the resources required for “sharing growth”. The combined revenue receipts, in India, of governments at all levels is 22% of GDP.

Meanwhile public outlays are critically short in health by 4% of GDP; education by 3% of GDP; infrastructure by 3% of GDP and defence by 2% of GDP. This adds up to 12% of GDP.

Around one third of the additional fiscal resources could come from continuing to grow at 6% per year – an achievable target. Another one third could be met from non-tax receipts like from privatisation and by targeting and distributing pro-poor subsidies digitally. But we cannot escape increasing our tax to GDP ratio to 26 % of GDP.

The drive against corruption; stricter adoption of banked transaction norms and the increasing popularity of digital transactions and online marketing are expected to ensure that tax collection in fiscal 2018 meets the budgetary targets of INR 19 trillion (including state share of INR 6.7 trillion).

This is despite a reduction in the budgeted nominal growth of GDP over last year from 11.8% to 9.5%. This buoyancy gives hope that continued rationalisation of tax rates; improved assessment and review processes and fairer and faster settlement of tax cases will induce better tax compliance.

We should learn from China how to devise local incentives for enhancing revenues. 99% of the 50 million Chinese officials are locally recruited and are never transferred away. They are truly a “permanent” bureaucracy.

Secondly, a significant part of their pay is linked to the fiscal health of their local unit. A healthy unit means higher bonuses and benefits for employees. Fiscal downturns bring austerity even in the take home benefits for employees. This close and sustained identification of officials with local offices and the localities where they exist, creates a shared bond between citizens and the officials — all of whom sink or swim, together.

In India, officials are birds of passage, even at the village level. Their take home pay and benefits are completely unlinked to the fiscal health of the local office or the locality they serve in. It is no surprise then that rent gouging is widely prevalent with no concern for making the locality or the employing organisation fiscally healthy.

The Chinese government does not habitually, bail out bankrupt local governments. They must work themselves out of the holes they dig for themselves. At the same time, the government does not hesitate to formally allow policy departures, at the local level, driven by exigency. Ironically, this makes “authoritarian” China, extremely decentralised and participative, whilst India — part of the “free world”, looks hopelessly rigid and centralised.

The WEF has cautioned that the near-term future is full of security, climate, technology and economic risks. They advise that resilience is the best antidote to risk. For complex organisations, enhancing resilience means embedding flexible, modular structures and business relationships, which allow the freedom to alter the scale of operations to fit demand and to cultivate innovation and the capacity to work at “the edge” of the frontier. Tellingly, none of this is aligned with a heavy top down, centralized, cookie-cutter, approach. Change is upon us. We must bend lest we break.

This commentary originally appeared in The Times of India.

It is estimated that 17,000 children every year are affected by maternal imprisonment in England and Wales. 95 per cent (16,000) of these children are forced to leave their homes as their mother’s imprisonment leaves them without an adult to take care of them.

Despite this, no government agency has responsibility for ensuring the welfare of these children is safeguarded and their rights are protected.

Dr Shona Minson, a Research Associate at the Centre for Criminology at Oxford University has conducted research on the implications of maternal imprisonment for children. The study explored the lived experience of children whose mothers were in prison at the time of interview. It is thought to be the largest study of its kind that has been conducted in England and Wales. Members of 27 family groups took part in the research, including 14 children and 22 adults who were taking care of children during their mother’s imprisonment.

The research findings show that the experience of having a mother in prison not only negatively impacts a child’s relationship with their mother, but can affect every area of their lives including their education, health, and wellbeing. The knock-on effects of stigmatisation may also lead to social isolation and discrimination. The work highlights the importance of considering child dependents and understanding the profound impact that maternal imprisonment can have on children who themselves have done nothing wrong. In the past week research from 2 other countries has been published indicating that parental imprisonment in childhood also contributes to premature death as an adult.

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and supported by the Prison Reform Trust Transforming Lives programme Dr Minson’s research findings have been used to create information resources for all criminal justice professionals involved in adult sentencing decisions, to support understanding of the impacts of maternal imprisonment on children.

Launching nationwide on 24 January, the resource includes short films and briefing papers, which will be used across the legal profession including by the Judicial College, Magistrates Association, Law Society, Criminal Bar Association and Probation services.

Dr Minson said, “My research found that children whose mothers are sent to prison are not afforded any of the same protections or support which are applied to children separated from their parents within the family courts as a result of care proceedings. Children of imprisoned mothers face extremely challenging circumstances which impact not only upon their immediate situations but also their future life chances.”

It is hoped that these resources will ensure that all professionals involved in sentencing, have a more comprehensive understanding of the potential impacts on children if their mother is imprisoned, and this will enable children’s welfare to be effectively safeguarded.

Welcoming the new resources, Jenny Earle of the Prison Reform Trust said, “Most of the solutions to women’s offending lie in the community – and it is especially important where children are impacted that their best interests be considered and their voices be heard.”

By David Seddon*

Pakistan, owing to its geographical location is in an ideal position to serve as a corridor to Central, South, East and West Asia. Not only does it provide easy trade links to these regions but has the potential to provide a convenient transit route too. This is one of the major reasons why Pakistan has always figured important in the regional and global politics.

The fact that it is located adjacent to world’s largest economies further elevates its status as a significant geostrategic location. Even though Pakistan’s economic indicators have not have been very hopeful in the past but with the CPEC unfolding fast and meeting its deadlines, Pakistan can prove to be a potential regional geographic hub by connecting and integrating the regional economies.

However, having the potential and tapping it to one’s advantage are two different things. The concerned authorities really need to look into the troubled areas and devise pragmatic policies to take advantage of this potential i.e. strategic location and geography. For now, even though the CPEC remains largely bilateral as is also evident from its nomenclature, its inclusivity cannot be ignored. Time and again there have been statements by the Chinese leaders where all and any country is welcomed to join the CPEC, if they wish to. This might practically materialize at some later stage when CPEC; the flag ship project of BRI starts to deliver.

While still in the developing stage it has managed to attract worldwide attention wherein large number of countries has shown the inclination to join. These countries include Russia, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Romania, Belarus, Ukraine, Italy, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, and the Central Asian Republics etc. Hence, once the CPEC is fully completed, it will be able to embrace in its folds several other countries into a mutual network of economic and security cooperation.

Therefore, this aspect of expanding the CPEC to the adjacent economies is not only doable but already under consideration. CPEC could then be specifically expanded to the neighboring economies of Central Asia, West Asia, Afghanistan and India. In such an arrangement, the Central Asian energy markets will not only be easily accessible but it will provide the resource rich landlocked Central Asia states to reach the markets in Pakistan, China, West Asia and India and an access to the warm waters. Once these goods have a larger outreach, it will foster the regional and global economic trade as well as connectivity.

The possibility for the CPEC to be extended to Central Asia, Afghanistan and India has already been mentioned by President Xi Jinping during his address to the Pakistani parliament on his first visit to Pakistan in April 2015. He welcomes the regional economic integration and believes that the changing geopolitical requirements demand reshuffling of policies. The same realization is there in the official circles of Pakistan that the reorientation of its regional and global economic policies focusing on the export oriented framework to the new global markets including the Indian markets in order to uplift its economy is the need of time. China-Pakistan trade volume is not too satisfactory at the moment, so the expansion of CPEC to India will only enlarge the volume of overall regional trade between China, Pakistan and India. CPEC provides an excellent opportunity to Pakistan to extend trade to South and Central Asia including India.

China attaches great importance to the CPEC for obvious reasons as it reduces its dependence on the South China Sea by allowing to directly connect to the Indian Ocean and the Middle East. This has given China the chance to bypass the highly contested waters of South China Sea which might be choked for the trade and traffic any time by the competing actors. Such a situation could be detrimental to China’s economic activities as 80% of its oil and energy needs are met by transportation through the Malacca Strait. Hence, the CPEC emerges as the major connection to the outside world for China if such a situation arises. China is on a lookout for the safe passage for its economic activity while the its economic and energy security interests in the region are under serious threats because of the heightened tensions between China and the global players in South and East China Sea.

This is especially true as the US rebalancing policy and Trans Pacific treaty in Asia Pacific region includes, military, economic and strategic cooperation with the South East Asian states including India against China. This eventually raises alarm for China. Gwadar port is 400 km away from the Strait of Hormuz. This allows China to transport its good at much lesser distance which would be reduced from 12000 km to only 3000 km. In this way, the Chinese goods to the West Asian markets can be made available in much lesser time, at much lesser cost of travel, and also by passing the contested Malacca Strait. This not only ensures the economic security i.e. unhindered flow of economic goods, but allows China to address its Malacca Dilemma.

For now, India has been working on an alternative access point i.e. Chabahar port to reach West Asia, Central Asia and Afghanistan. This is understandable given the long history of rivalry between Pakistan and India where Pakistan naturally feels reluctant to give a free passage to India through its soil. This move to bypass Pakistan has become more evident in the wake of trilateral framework between India, Iran and Afghanistan for economic cooperation. Nonetheless, such strict positions and distrusts need to be mitigated and instead the regional dividends for al should be made the bigger cause.

One possibility could be to make Gwadar and Chabahar ports into regional imports, including other regional states in them to increase the regional trade. Iran has floated this idea to Pakistan regarding the Chabahar port while Pakistan has also reassured to India that Gwadar should not be seen as the rival port but a regional port instead.

Pakistan on its part should give importance to the successful and timely materialization of the CPEC and then focus on making its regionally inclusive. As the Federal Minister for Planning, Development and Reform, Ahsan Iqbal, mentioned that Pakistan had achieved 5% economic growth and is now able to create a favourable socio-economic ecosystem that enjoyed political stability. A favourable ecosystem is what the country needs to continue to focus on in order to attract the interest of key global investors which are now eying Pakistan as a potential market for investments. China is promoting regional and global connectivity across the Asia Pacific region as part of its One Belt One Road initiative. Similarly, Pakistan’s Vision 2025 focuses on helping Pakistan to leverage its geo-strategic location in order to explore the inherent economic options.

*The author, Sadia Kazmi is a Senior Research Associate at the Strategic Vision Institute, Islamabad. She is pursuing a PhD in the Department of Strategic Studies at the National Defence University, Islamabad. She can be reached at sadia.kazmi.svi@gmail.com

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently gave his permission for the opening of an exhibition at the U.N. building in New York City. Entitled “Jasenovac – The Right to Remember,” the exhibit is part of a joint Serbian-Jewish project connected to International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It focuses on war crimes committed in the most notorious World War II concentration camp in Croatia – Jasenovac. While reports on the number of people who died there vary greatly, the memorial webpage maintains a list of 69,842 victims.

No one questions the importance of remembering and documenting the horrors of the concentration camps, but Croatian authorities have protested aspects of the exhibit. The biggest problem has to do with how it portrays Archbishop (later Cardinal) Alojzije Stepinac from the Archdiocese of Zagreb. Rather than being a collaborator with those who ran the camp, as the exhibit suggests, he openly opposed the abuses and defended the victims of Jasenovac. Allegations against him are most unfair.

During the Second World War, when Croatia was part of Yugoslavia, a pro-Nazi group, the Ustaše, came to power under leader Ante Pavelic. Ustaše leaders claimed a Catholic background, but they were not on good terms with the Church. They were very vicious in their persecution of Jews, Serbs, and anyone who got in their way. They also ignored repeated instruction from the Church not to engage in forcible conversions.

Stepinac often preached against racism and in support of Serbs, Jews, and others who were persecuted for their race. His sermons against the Ustaše were so strong that the fascist leaders prohibited their publication. There is even a story about a Nazi officer who came to Zagreb and heard Stepinac condemn the Ustaše’s actions so strongly that he said, “If a churchman in Germany spoke like that, he would not step down from the pulpit alive.”

The Associated Press reported that “by 1942 Stepinac had become a harsh critic” of the Ustaše, condemning its “genocidal policies, which killed tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and Croats.” The feud between the Ustaše and the Church eventually got so serious that several Catholic priests were sent to Jasenovac.

In 1943, Stepinac wrote that “Jasenovac is a shame and stain for the Independent State of Croatia…. The entire nation, particularly the close families of the murdered seek retribution, reparation, the bringing of the executioners before the court. They are the gravest misfortune of Croatia!” He sent money and sacks of flour to the Jewish community on a monthly basis for the benefit of the inmates at Jasenovac.

Stepinac’s reputation was tainted after the war when a Soviet-dominated Communist government took over and began persecuting the Church. Stepinac was tried and convicted of treason and collaboration with the Ustaše in a proceeding that was widely recognized as a show trial. With the fall of communism, the unfairness of the trial was revealed. In 2016, his conviction was annulled due to “gross violations of current and former fundamental principles of substantive and procedural criminal law.” Pope John Paul II, of course, did not need to wait for that governmental action; he declared Stepinac a martyr and beatified the cardinal in 1998.

Historians should take care not to perpetrate falsehoods as they work to memorialize the past. Croation authorities are legitimately concerned that the display at the U.N. will do just that.

Contact the Spokesman for the Secretary-General, Stephane Dujarric: 
dujarric@un.org

*Professor Rychlak has lectured and authored works on Cardinal Stepinac; has written eight books; is a past honoree at the U.S. Holocaust Museum for his work on inter-faith dialogue; is an advisor to the Holy See’s delegation to the U.N.; and serves on the advisory board of the Catholic League.

By Nick Cunningham

Echoing the criticism of too much hype surrounding U.S. shale from the Saudi oil minister last week, a new report finds that shale drilling is still largely not profitable. Not only that, but costs are on the rise and drillers are pursuing “irrational production.”

Riyadh-based Al Rajhi Capital dug into the financials of a long list of U.S. shale companies, and found that “despite rising prices most firms under our study are still in losses with no signs of improvement.” The average return on asset for U.S. shale companies “is still a measly 0.8 percent,” the financial services company wrote in its report.

Moreover, the widely-publicized efficiency gains could be overstated, at least according to Al Rajhi Capital. The firm said that in the third quarter of 2017, the “average operating cost per barrel has broadly remained the same without any efficiency gains.” Not only that, but the cost of producing a barrel of oil, after factoring in the cost of spending and higher debt levels, has actually been rising quite a bit.

Shale companies often tout their rock-bottom breakeven prices, and they often use a narrowly defined metric that only includes the cost of drilling and production, leaving out all other costs. But because there are a lot of other expenses, only focusing on operating costs can be a bit misleading.

The Al Rajhi Capital report concludes that operating costs have indeed edged down over the past several years. However, a broader measure of the “cash required per barrel,” which includes other costs such as depreciation, interest expense, tax expense, and spending on drilling and exploration, reveals a more damning picture. Al Rajhi finds that this “cash required per barrel” metric has been rising for several consecutive quarters, hitting an average $64 per barrel in the third quarter of 2017. That was a period of time in which WTI traded much lower, which essentially means that the average shale player was not profitable.

Not everyone is posting poor figures. Diamondback Energy and Continental Resources had breakeven prices at about $52 and $37 per barrel in the third quarter, respectively, according to the Al Rajhi report. Parsley Energy, on the other hand, saw its “cash required per barrel” price rise to nearly $100 per barrel in the third quarter.

A long list of shale companies have promised a more cautious approach this year, with an emphasis on profits. It remains to be seen if that will happen, especially given the recent run up in prices.

But Al Rajhi questions whether spending cuts will even result in a better financial position. “Even when capex declines, we are unlikely to see any sustained drop in cash flow required per barrel … due to the nature of shale production and rising interest expenses,” the Al Rajhi report concluded. In other words, cutting spending only leads to lower production, and the resulting decline in revenues will offset the benefit of lower spending. All the while, interest payments need to be made, which could be on the rise if debt levels are climbing.

One factor that has worked against some shale drillers is that the advantage of hedging future production has all but disappeared. In FY15 and FY16, the companies surveyed realized revenue gains on the order of $15 and $9 per barrel, respectively, by locking in future production at higher prices than what ended up prevailing in the market. But, that advantage has vanished. In the third quarter of 2017, the same companies only earned an extra $1 per barrel on average by hedging.

Part of the reason for that is rising oil prices, as well as a flattening of the futures curve. Indeed, recently WTI and Brent have showed a strong trend toward backwardation — in which longer-dated prices trade lower than near-term. That makes it much less attractive to lock in future production.

Al Rajhi Capital notes that more recently, shale companies ended up locking in hedges at prices that could end up being quite a bit lower than the market price, which could limit their upside exposure should prices continue to rise.

In short, the report needs to be offered as a retort against aggressive forecasts for shale production growth. Drilling is clearly on the rise and U.S. oil production is expected to increase for the foreseeable future. But the lack of profitability remains a significant problem for the shale industry.

Source: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Why-Is-The-Shale-Industry-Still-Not-Profitable.html

Two veteran Russian cosmonaut spacewalkers will venture outside the International Space Station on Friday, Feb. 2, for a planned 6.5-hour station servicing session. Live coverage of the spacewalk will air on NASA Television and the agency’s website beginning at 9:45 a.m. EST.

Expedition 54 Commander Alexander Misurkin and Flight Engineer Anton Shkaplerov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos are set to float out of the space station’s Pirs docking compartment airlock in Russian Orlan spacesuits at 10:34 a.m.

Misurkin and Shkaplerov’s primary objectives during the spacewalk will be to remove and jettison an electronics box for a high-gain communications antenna on the Zvezda service module and install an upgraded electronics box to communication between Russian flight controllers and the Russian modules of the orbital outpost. The cosmonauts also will take detailed photos of the exterior of the Russian modules and retrieve experiments housed on Zvezda’s hull.

The Russian spacewalk will be the fourth in Misurkin’s career and the second for Shkaplerov, as well as the 207th spacewalk in support of space station assembly and maintenance. Both of their suits will be marked with blue stripes.

TO THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES:

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, the First Lady of the United States, and my fellow Americans:

Less than 1 year has passed since I first stood at this podium, in this majestic chamber, to speak on behalf of the American People — and to address their concerns, their hopes, and their dreams. That night, our new Administration had already taken swift action. A new tide of optimism was already sweeping across our land.

Each day since, we have gone forward with a clear vision and a righteous mission — to make America great again for all Americans.

Over the last year, we have made incredible progress and achieved extraordinary success. We have faced challenges we expected, and others we could never have imagined. We have shared in the heights of victory and the pains of hardship. We endured floods and fires and storms. But through it all, we have seen the beauty of America’s soul, and the steel in America’s spine.

Each test has forged new American heroes to remind us who we are, and show us what we can be.

We saw the volunteers of the “Cajun Navy,” racing to the rescue with their fishing boats to save people in the aftermath of a devastating hurricane.

We saw strangers shielding strangers from a hail of gunfire on the Las Vegas strip.

We heard tales of Americans like Coast Guard Petty Officer Ashlee Leppert, who is here tonight in the gallery with Melania. Ashlee was aboard one of the first helicopters on the scene in Houston during Hurricane Harvey. Through 18 hours of wind and rain, Ashlee braved live power lines and deep water, to help save more than 40 lives. Thank you, Ashlee.

We heard about Americans like firefighter David Dahlberg. He is here with us too. David faced down walls of flame to rescue almost 60 children trapped at a California summer camp threatened by wildfires.

To everyone still recovering in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, California, and everywhere else — we are with you, we love you, and we will pull through together.

Some trials over the past year touched this chamber very personally. With us tonight is one of the toughest people ever to serve in this House — a guy who took a bullet, almost died, and was back to work three and a half months later: the legend from Louisiana, Congressman Steve Scalise.

We are incredibly grateful for the heroic efforts of the Capitol Police Officers, the Alexandria Police, and the doctors, nurses, and paramedics who saved his life, and the lives of many others in this room.

In the aftermath of that terrible shooting, we came together, not as Republicans or Democrats, but as representatives of the people. But it is not enough to come together only in times of tragedy. Tonight, I call upon all of us to set aside our differences, to seek out common ground, and to summon the unity we need to deliver for the people we were elected to serve.

Over the last year, the world has seen what we always knew: that no people on Earth are so fearless, or daring, or determined as Americans. If there is a mountain, we climb it. If there is a frontier, we cross it. If there is a challenge, we tame it. If there is an opportunity, we seize it.

So let us begin tonight by recognizing that the state of our Union is strong because our people are strong.

And together, we are building a safe, strong, and proud America.

Since the election, we have created 2.4 million new jobs, including 200,000 new jobs in manufacturing alone. After years of wage stagnation, we are finally seeing rising wages.

Unemployment claims have hit a 45-year low. African-American unemployment stands at the lowest rate ever recorded, and Hispanic American unemployment has also reached the lowest levels in history.

Small business confidence is at an all-time high. The stock market has smashed one record after another, gaining $8 trillion in value. That is great news for Americans’ 401k, retirement, pension, and college savings accounts.

And just as I promised the American people from this podium 11 months ago, we enacted the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history.

Our massive tax cuts provide tremendous relief for the middle class and small businesses.

To lower tax rates for hardworking Americans, we nearly doubled the standard deduction for everyone. Now, the first $24,000 earned by a married couple is completely tax-free. We also doubled the child tax credit.

A typical family of four making $75,000 will see their tax bill reduced by $2,000 — slashing their tax bill in half.

This April will be the last time you ever file under the old broken system — and millions of Americans will have more take-home pay starting next month.

We eliminated an especially cruel tax that fell mostly on Americans making less than $50,000 a year — forcing them to pay tremendous penalties simply because they could not afford government-ordered health plans. We repealed the core of disastrous Obamacare — the individual mandate is now gone.

We slashed the business tax rate from 35 percent all the way down to 21 percent, so American companies can compete and win against anyone in the world. These changes alone are estimated to increase average family income by more than $4,000.

Small businesses have also received a massive tax cut, and can now deduct 20 percent of their business income.

Here tonight are Steve Staub and Sandy Keplinger of Staub Manufacturing — a small business in Ohio. They have just finished the best year in their 20-year history. Because of tax reform, they are handing out raises, hiring an additional 14 people, and expanding into the building next door.

One of Staub’s employees, Corey Adams, is also with us tonight. Corey is an all-American worker. He supported himself through high school, lost his job during the 2008 recession, and was later hired by Staub, where he trained to become a welder. Like many hardworking Americans, Corey plans to invest his tax‑cut raise into his new home and his two daughters’ education. Please join me in congratulating Corey.

Since we passed tax cuts, roughly 3 million workers have already gotten tax cut bonuses — many of them thousands of dollars per worker. Apple has just announced it plans to invest a total of $350 billion in America, and hire another 20,000 workers.

This is our new American moment. There has never been a better time to start living the American Dream.

So to every citizen watching at home tonight — no matter where you have been, or where you come from, this is your time. If you work hard, if you believe in yourself, if you believe in America, then you can dream anything, you can be anything, and together, we can achieve anything.

Tonight, I want to talk about what kind of future we are going to have, and what kind of Nation we are going to be. All of us, together, as one team, one people, and one American family.

We all share the same home, the same heart, the same destiny, and the same great American flag.

Together, we are rediscovering the American way.

In America, we know that faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, are the center of the American life. Our motto is “in God we trust.”

And we celebrate our police, our military, and our amazing veterans as heroes who deserve our total and unwavering support.

Here tonight is Preston Sharp, a 12-year-old boy from Redding, California, who noticed that veterans’ graves were not marked with flags on Veterans Day. He decided to change that, and started a movement that has now placed 40,000 flags at the graves of our great heroes. Preston: a job well done.

Young patriots like Preston teach all of us about our civic duty as Americans. Preston’s reverence for those who have served our Nation reminds us why we salute our flag, why we put our hands on our hearts for the pledge of allegiance, and why we proudly stand for the national anthem.

Americans love their country. And they deserve a Government that shows them the same love and loyalty in return.

For the last year we have sought to restore the bonds of trust between our citizens and their Government.

Working with the Senate, we are appointing judges who will interpret the Constitution as written, including a great new Supreme Court Justice, and more circuit court judges than any new administration in the history of our country.

We are defending our Second Amendment, and have taken historic actions to protect religious liberty.

And we are serving our brave veterans, including giving our veterans choice in their healthcare decisions. Last year, the Congress passed, and I signed, the landmark VA Accountability Act. Since its passage, my Administration has already removed more than 1,500 VA employees who failed to give our veterans the care they deserve — and we are hiring talented people who love our vets as much as we do.

I will not stop until our veterans are properly taken care of, which has been my promise to them from the very beginning of this great journey.

All Americans deserve accountability and respect — and that is what we are giving them. So tonight, I call on the Congress to empower every Cabinet Secretary with the authority to reward good workers — and to remove Federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people.

In our drive to make Washington accountable, we have eliminated more regulations in our first year than any administration in history.

We have ended the war on American Energy — and we have ended the war on clean coal. We are now an exporter of energy to the world.

In Detroit, I halted Government mandates that crippled America’s autoworkers — so we can get the Motor City revving its engines once again.

Many car companies are now building and expanding plants in the United States — something we have not seen for decades. Chrysler is moving a major plant from Mexico to Michigan; Toyota and Mazda are opening up a plant in Alabama. Soon, plants will be opening up all over the country. This is all news Americans are unaccustomed to hearing — for many years, companies and jobs were only leaving us. But now they are coming back.

Exciting progress is happening every day.

To speed access to breakthrough cures and affordable generic drugs, last year the FDA approved more new and generic drugs and medical devices than ever before in our history.

We also believe that patients with terminal conditions should have access to experimental treatments that could potentially save their lives.

People who are terminally ill should not have to go from country to country to seek a cure — I want to give them a chance right here at home. It is time for the Congress to give these wonderful Americans the “right to try.”

One of my greatest priorities is to reduce the price of prescription drugs. In many other countries, these drugs cost far less than what we pay in the United States. That is why I have directed my Administration to make fixing the injustice of high drug prices one of our top priorities. Prices will come down.

America has also finally turned the page on decades of unfair trade deals that sacrificed our prosperity and shipped away our companies, our jobs, and our Nation’s wealth.

The era of economic surrender is over.

From now on, we expect trading relationships to be fair and to be reciprocal.

We will work to fix bad trade deals and negotiate new ones.

And we will protect American workers and American intellectual property, through strong enforcement of our trade rules.

As we rebuild our industries, it is also time to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure.

America is a nation of builders. We built the Empire State Building in just 1 year — is it not a disgrace that it can now take 10 years just to get a permit approved for a simple road?

I am asking both parties to come together to give us the safe, fast, reliable, and modern infrastructure our economy needs and our people deserve.

Tonight, I am calling on the Congress to produce a bill that generates at least $1.5 trillion for the new infrastructure investment we need.

Every Federal dollar should be leveraged by partnering with State and local governments and, where appropriate, tapping into private sector investment — to permanently fix the infrastructure deficit.

Any bill must also streamline the permitting and approval process — getting it down to no more than two years, and perhaps even one.

Together, we can reclaim our building heritage. We will build gleaming new roads, bridges, highways, railways, and waterways across our land. And we will do it with American heart, American hands, and American grit.

We want every American to know the dignity of a hard day’s work. We want every child to be safe in their home at night. And we want every citizen to be proud of this land that we love.

We can lift our citizens from welfare to work, from dependence to independence, and from poverty to prosperity.

As tax cuts create new jobs, let us invest in workforce development and job training. Let us open great vocational schools so our future workers can learn a craft and realize their full potential. And let us support working families by supporting paid family leave.

As America regains its strength, this opportunity must be extended to all citizens. That is why this year we will embark on reforming our prisons to help former inmates who have served their time get a second chance.

Struggling communities, especially immigrant communities, will also be helped by immigration policies that focus on the best interests of American workers and American families.

For decades, open borders have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our most vulnerable communities. They have allowed millions of low-wage workers to compete for jobs and wages against the poorest Americans. Most tragically, they have caused the loss of many innocent lives.

Here tonight are two fathers and two mothers: Evelyn Rodriguez, Freddy Cuevas, Elizabeth Alvarado, and Robert Mickens. Their two teenage daughters — Kayla Cuevas and Nisa Mickens — were close friends on Long Island. But in September 2016, on the eve of Nisa’s 16th Birthday, neither of them came home. These two precious girls were brutally murdered while walking together in their hometown. Six members of the savage gang MS-13 have been charged with Kayla and Nisa’s murders. Many of these gang members took advantage of glaring loopholes in our laws to enter the country as unaccompanied alien minors ‑- and wound up in Kayla and Nisa’s high school.

Evelyn, Elizabeth, Freddy, and Robert: Tonight, everyone in this chamber is praying for you. Everyone in America is grieving for you. And 320 million hearts are breaking for you. We cannot imagine the depth of your sorrow, but we can make sure that other families never have to endure this pain.

Tonight, I am calling on the Congress to finally close the deadly loopholes that have allowed MS-13, and other criminals, to break into our country. We have proposed new legislation that will fix our immigration laws, and support our ICE and Border Patrol Agents, so that this cannot ever happen again.

The United States is a compassionate nation. We are proud that we do more than any other country to help the needy, the struggling, and the underprivileged all over the world. But as President of the United States, my highest loyalty, my greatest compassion, and my constant concern is for America’s children, America’s struggling workers, and America’s forgotten communities. I want our youth to grow up to achieve great things. I want our poor to have their chance to rise.

So tonight, I am extending an open hand to work with members of both parties — Democrats and Republicans — to protect our citizens of every background, color, religion, and creed. My duty, and the sacred duty of every elected official in this chamber, is to defend Americans — to protect their safety, their families, their communities, and their right to the American Dream. Because Americans are dreamers too.

Here tonight is one leader in the effort to defend our country: Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Celestino Martinez — he goes by CJ. CJ served 15 years in the Air Force before becoming an ICE agent and spending the last 15 years fighting gang violence and getting dangerous criminals off our streets. At one point, MS-13 leaders ordered CJ’s murder. But he did not cave to threats or fear. Last May, he commanded an operation to track down gang members on Long Island. His team has arrested nearly 400, including more than 220 from MS-13.

CJ: Great work. Now let us get the Congress to send you some reinforcements.

Over the next few weeks, the House and Senate will be voting on an immigration reform package.

In recent months, my Administration has met extensively with both Democrats and Republicans to craft a bipartisan approach to immigration reform. Based on these discussions, we presented the Congress with a detailed proposal that should be supported by both parties as a fair compromise — one where nobody gets everything they want, but where our country gets the critical reforms it needs.

Here are the four pillars of our plan:

The first pillar of our framework generously offers a path to citizenship for 1.8 million illegal immigrants who were brought here by their parents at a young age — that covers almost three times more people than the previous administration. Under our plan, those who meet education and work requirements, and show good moral character, will be able to become full citizens of the United States.

The second pillar fully secures the border. That means building a wall on the Southern border, and it means hiring more heroes like CJ to keep our communities safe. Crucially, our plan closes the terrible loopholes exploited by criminals and terrorists to enter our country — and it finally ends the dangerous practice of “catch and release.”

The third pillar ends the visa lottery — a program that randomly hands out green cards without any regard for skill, merit, or the safety of our people. It is time to begin moving towards a merit-based immigration system — one that admits people who are skilled, who want to work, who will contribute to our society, and who will love and respect our country.

The fourth and final pillar protects the nuclear family by ending chain migration. Under the current broken system, a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives. Under our plan, we focus on the immediate family by limiting sponsorships to spouses and minor children. This vital reform is necessary, not just for our economy, but for our security, and our future.

In recent weeks, two terrorist attacks in New York were made possible by the visa lottery and chain migration. In the age of terrorism, these programs present risks we can no longer afford.

It is time to reform these outdated immigration rules, and finally bring our immigration system into the 21st century.

These four pillars represent a down-the-middle compromise, and one that will create a safe, modern, and lawful immigration system.

For over 30 years, Washington has tried and failed to solve this problem. This Congress can be the one that finally makes it happen.

Most importantly, these four pillars will produce legislation that fulfills my ironclad pledge to only sign a bill that puts America first. So let us come together, set politics aside, and finally get the job done.

These reforms will also support our response to the terrible crisis of opioid and drug addiction.

In 2016, we lost 64,000 Americans to drug overdoses: 174 deaths per day. Seven per hour. We must get much tougher on drug dealers and pushers if we are going to succeed in stopping this scourge.

My Administration is committed to fighting the drug epidemic and helping get treatment for those in need. The struggle will be long and difficult — but, as Americans always do, we will prevail.

As we have seen tonight, the most difficult challenges bring out the best in America.

We see a vivid expression of this truth in the story of the Holets family of New Mexico. Ryan Holets is 27 years old, and an officer with the Albuquerque Police Department. He is here tonight with his wife Rebecca. Last year, Ryan was on duty when he saw a pregnant, homeless woman preparing to inject heroin. When Ryan told her she was going to harm her unborn child, she began to weep. She told him she did not know where to turn, but badly wanted a safe home for her baby.

In that moment, Ryan said he felt God speak to him: “You will do it — because you can.” He took out a picture of his wife and their four kids. Then, he went home to tell his wife Rebecca. In an instant, she agreed to adopt. The Holets named their new daughter Hope.

Ryan and Rebecca: You embody the goodness of our Nation. Thank you, and congratulations.

As we rebuild America’s strength and confidence at home, we are also restoring our strength and standing abroad.

Around the world, we face rogue regimes, terrorist groups, and rivals like China and Russia that challenge our interests, our economy, and our values. In confronting these dangers, we know that weakness is the surest path to conflict, and unmatched power is the surest means of our defense.

For this reason, I am asking the Congress to end the dangerous defense sequester and fully fund our great military.

As part of our defense, we must modernize and rebuild our nuclear arsenal, hopefully never having to use it, but making it so strong and powerful that it will deter any acts of aggression. Perhaps someday in the future there will be a magical moment when the countries of the world will get together to eliminate their nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, we are not there yet.

Last year, I also pledged that we would work with our allies to extinguish ISIS from the face of the Earth. One year later, I am proud to report that the coalition to defeat ISIS has liberated almost 100 percent of the territory once held by these killers in Iraq and Syria. But there is much more work to be done. We will continue our fight until ISIS is defeated.

Army Staff Sergeant Justin Peck is here tonight. Near Raqqa last November, Justin and his comrade, Chief Petty Officer Kenton Stacy, were on a mission to clear buildings that ISIS had rigged with explosives so that civilians could return to the city.

Clearing the second floor of a vital hospital, Kenton Stacy was severely wounded by an explosion. Immediately, Justin bounded into the booby-trapped building and found Kenton in bad shape. He applied pressure to the wound and inserted a tube to reopen an airway. He then performed CPR for 20 straight minutes during the ground transport and maintained artificial respiration through 2 hours of emergency surgery.

Kenton Stacy would have died if not for Justin’s selfless love for a fellow warrior. Tonight, Kenton is recovering in Texas. Raqqa is liberated. And Justin is wearing his new Bronze Star, with a “V” for “Valor.” Staff Sergeant Peck: All of America salutes you.

Terrorists who do things like place bombs in civilian hospitals are evil. When possible, we annihilate them. When necessary, we must be able to detain and question them. But we must be clear: Terrorists are not merely criminals. They are unlawful enemy combatants. And when captured overseas, they should be treated like the terrorists they are.

In the past, we have foolishly released hundreds of dangerous terrorists, only to meet them again on the battlefield — including the ISIS leader, al-Baghdadi.

So today, I am keeping another promise. I just signed an order directing Secretary Mattis to reexamine our military detention policy and to keep open the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay.

I am also asking the Congress to ensure that, in the fight against ISIS and al-Qa’ida, we continue to have all necessary power to detain terrorists — wherever we chase them down.

Our warriors in Afghanistan also have new rules of engagement. Along with their heroic Afghan partners, our military is no longer undermined by artificial timelines, and we no longer tell our enemies our plans.

Last month, I also took an action endorsed unanimously by the Senate just months before: I recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Shortly afterwards, dozens of countries voted in the United Nations General Assembly against America’s sovereign right to make this recognition. American taxpayers generously send those same countries billions of dollars in aid every year.

That is why, tonight, I am asking the Congress to pass legislation to help ensure American foreign-assistance dollars always serve American interests, and only go to America’s friends.

As we strengthen friendships around the world, we are also restoring clarity about our adversaries.

When the people of Iran rose up against the crimes of their corrupt dictatorship, I did not stay silent. America stands with the people of Iran in their courageous struggle for freedom.

I am asking the Congress to address the fundamental flaws in the terrible Iran nuclear deal.

My Administration has also imposed tough sanctions on the communist and socialist dictatorships in Cuba and Venezuela.

But no regime has oppressed its own citizens more totally or brutally than the cruel dictatorship in North Korea.

North Korea’s reckless pursuit of nuclear missiles could very soon threaten our homeland.

We are waging a campaign of maximum pressure to prevent that from happening.

Past experience has taught us that complacency and concessions only invite aggression and provocation. I will not repeat the mistakes of past administrations that got us into this dangerous position.

We need only look at the depraved character of the North Korean regime to understand the nature of the nuclear threat it could pose to America and our allies.

Otto Warmbier was a hardworking student at the University of Virginia. On his way to study abroad in Asia, Otto joined a tour to North Korea. At its conclusion, this wonderful young man was arrested and charged with crimes against the state. After a shameful trial, the dictatorship sentenced Otto to 15 years of hard labor, before returning him to America last June — horribly injured and on the verge of death. He passed away just days after his return.

Otto’s Parents, Fred and Cindy Warmbier, are with us tonight — along with Otto’s brother and sister, Austin and Greta. You are powerful witnesses to a menace that threatens our world, and your strength inspires us all. Tonight, we pledge to honor Otto’s memory with American resolve.

Finally, we are joined by one more witness to the ominous nature of this regime. His name is Mr. Ji Seong-ho.

In 1996, Seong-ho was a starving boy in North Korea. One day, he tried to steal coal from a railroad car to barter for a few scraps of food. In the process, he passed out on the train tracks, exhausted from hunger. He woke up as a train ran over his limbs. He then endured multiple amputations without anything to dull the pain. His brother and sister gave what little food they had to help him recover and ate dirt themselves — permanently stunting their own growth. Later, he was tortured by North Korean authorities after returning from a brief visit to China. His tormentors wanted to know if he had met any Christians. He had — and he resolved to be free.

Seong-ho traveled thousands of miles on crutches across China and Southeast Asia to freedom. Most of his family followed. His father was caught trying to escape, and was tortured to death.

Today he lives in Seoul, where he rescues other defectors, and broadcasts into North Korea what the regime fears the most ‑- the truth.

Today he has a new leg, but Seong-ho, I understand you still keep those crutches as a reminder of how far you have come. Your great sacrifice is an inspiration to us all.

Seong-ho’s story is a testament to the yearning of every human soul to live in freedom.

It was that same yearning for freedom that nearly 250 years ago gave birth to a special place called America. It was a small cluster of colonies caught between a great ocean and a vast wilderness. But it was home to an incredible people with a revolutionary idea: that they could rule themselves. That they could chart their own destiny. And that, together, they could light up the world.

That is what our country has always been about. That is what Americans have always stood for, always strived for, and always done.

Atop the dome of this Capitol stands the Statue of Freedom. She stands tall and dignified among the monuments to our ancestors who fought and lived and died to protect her.

Monuments to Washington and Jefferson — to Lincoln and King.

Memorials to the heroes of Yorktown and Saratoga — to young Americans who shed their blood on the shores of Normandy, and the fields beyond. And others, who went down in the waters of the Pacific and the skies over Asia.

And freedom stands tall over one more monument: this one. This Capitol. This living monument to the American people.

A people whose heroes live not only in the past, but all around us — defending hope, pride, and the American way.

They work in every trade. They sacrifice to raise a family. They care for our children at home. They defend our flag abroad. They are strong moms and brave kids. They are firefighters, police officers, border agents, medics, and Marines.

But above all else, they are Americans. And this Capitol, this city, and this Nation, belong to them.

Our task is to respect them, to listen to them, to serve them, to protect them, and to always be worthy of them.

Americans fill the world with art and music. They push the bounds of science and discovery. And they forever remind us of what we should never forget: The people dreamed this country. The people built this country. And it is the people who are making America great again.

As long as we are proud of who we are, and what we are fighting for, there is nothing we cannot achieve.

As long as we have confidence in our values, faith in our citizens, and trust in our God, we will not fail.

Our families will thrive.

Our people will prosper.

And our Nation will forever be safe and strong and proud and mighty and free.

Thank you, and God bless America.

THE WHITE HOUSE,