The High-level Regional Conference on Information Management for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Resilience opened today in Tehran with a strong focus on regional cooperation for combating sand and dust storms in Asia and the Pacific.

Sand and dust storms, along with drought, land degradation, desertification and wind erosion, present a formidable challenge to sustainable development. Approximately 2 trillion tons of dust is emitted into the atmosphere each year, with the Asia-Pacific region contributing 27 per cent to global emissions. Disaster risks are also outpacing disaster resilience, and the gap is growing in the countries with the least capacity to prepare for or respond to disasters.

Recognizing these challenges, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran today signed an Agreement to establish the Asian and the Pacific Centre for the Development of Disaster Information Management (APDIM) in Tehran. The Centre will strengthen regional cooperation in DRR and promote effective policies for inclusive, sustainable and resilient development in the region.

In her opening statement, UN Under Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of ESCAP Dr. Shamshad Akhtar highlighted that disasters impede the social and economic development of nations and communities at a global scale, and underlined the importance of finding sustainable solutions to address these risks in the highly vulnerable Asia-Pacific.

“Disaster risk reduction and resilience building is a top priority for ESCAP,” said Dr. Akhtar. “Establishing APDIM and the regional conference in Tehran is just one example of how we are supporting countries to increase their resilience through targeted capacity development for disaster information management and knowledge sharing.”

The significant and increasing impacts of sand and dust storms affect a range of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to human health, productivity, agriculture, infrastructure and transport. Therefore, reducing the harmful impacts of sand and dust storms will be essential to making progress on the SDGs.

In response, ESCAP has conducted an analytical study that proposes a four track-strategy for a regional cooperation mechanism for mitigating and adapting to sand and dust storms. The strategy suggests addressing the drivers through a multiple-hazard approach; developing a sand and dust storms alert system; establishing an Asia-Pacific sand and dust storm network, and leveraging the APDIM for enhanced technical support.

The UN Security Council is waiting for an interesting time. At least, such a conclusion can be drawn from the stated working agenda for the next month. In January 2018, the UN Security Council was headed by one of its non-permanent members, the Republic of Kazakhstan. This young, ambitious country has been demonstrating effective credibility in the world, as well as the reputation of a peacekeeper in international conflicts besides commitment towards uncompromising stance to fight against terrorism and extremism.

The country has a history of peaceful growth and firm adherence to the international norms for non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. It was during the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the state got world’s fourth largest nuclear arsenal however, the stiff resolution to withdraw those voluntarily was a depiction of Kazakhstan’s intentions enduring global peace and a world free of weapons of mass destruction. The country even set an example for many others that how to maintain the status of a nuclear-weapon free country thus significantly changed the mindsets rooted in hawkish realities on the ground that prestige in global affairs is not merely confined with the possession of the nuclear weapons.

The world has already been facing severe strain and still suffering at the hands of terrorism, extremism and evils that drag the human race towards an unending arms race and destruction. In such a scenario, the role of countries who believe in peaceful co-existence and growth for the common welfare must be encouraged. Amidst prevailing nuclear tension in Korean peninsula that is also a major cause of regional and global concern however, a nuclear weapon free country would exceptionally serve for the realization of nuclear ambitious states that a constructive role without possessing nuclear weapons can also enable states to play a key role in global affairs and international institutions like the UN Security Council.

The actions of states and the words of the leaders have lasting effects which in actuality at some point also contribute in making history. The pledging efforts and the initiatives set forth by Nursultan Nazarbayev further progress towards prospective hope that the Korean conflict will be settled and the two Koreas will soon make peace. Moreover, the Chairmanship of the Kazakhstan of Security Council in such a globally anarchic scenario will prove as newfangled impetus for a peaceful world progressing towards disarmament and non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The priorities of Kazakhstan as a member of the UN Security Council in 2017-2018 are outlined in President Nazarbayev’s political address to the UN Security Council which in actuality can be termed as conceptual vision of Kazakhstan on strengthening global partnership for building a safe, just and prosperous world. One of the first initiatives of the new chairmanship was the official flag-setting ceremony for countries elected last year by the non-permanent members of the Council – Côte d’Ivoire, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Peru, Poland and Equatorial Guinea. Representatives of many delegations called this event “a bright business card.” It is assumed that such ceremonies will become a new tradition of the organization.

During the first working day, the program of the Security Council activity was presented, which was subsequently voiced at a briefing for the UN member states. The topics chosen are the most current – nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction, promotion of green technologies, solution of humanitarian problems in the zones of military conflicts and also the resolution of conflicts itself. The UN Security Council will have to analyze the situation around North Korea, Iran, Myanmar, Palestine and Israel including prospective status of Jerusalem and many other countries. Moreover, during quarterly open debates of January on the “Situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian Question”, as well as open and closed discussions on the problems of Syria, Libya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, CAR, Darfur, West Africa and the Sahel, Southern Sudan , Mali, Somalia, Cyprus and Colombia came under discussion. A number of resolutions and statements of the new Security Council chairman are yet to be adopted.

The proposed program was approved and supported by the permanent member countries of the UN Security Council. The Permanent Representative of Russia to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzia, expressed confidence in the success of the work of the Kazakh delegation in the capacity of Chairman of the Council. The US Ambassador Nicky Haley and other ambassadors of the Council’s member countries noted the informative and saturated program of Kazakhstan, as well as the fact that it focuses on the most actual issues and contemporary challenges in the world. The permanent representative of Kazakhstan to the UN Kairat Umarov highlighted the importance of paying more attention to building trust relations between different political leaders and countries because it is inevitable to solve the problems.

President Trump invited Nursultan Nazarbayev, President of the Republic of Kazakhstan and Central Asia’s undisputed leader, for an official working visit to the United States. The head of Kazakhstan will become one of the first foreign leaders with whom, after his election, the head of the White House, who has been in office for almost a year, will meet. At the same time, it is expected that in the near future Nazarbayev will also hold an official meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin therefore; such developments illustrate the active role of Kazakhstan in international affairs.

On January 16, 2018, Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev visited the United States and met with his counterpart Donald Trump and held in New York thematic debates of the UN High Security Council members on the topic “Non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction: Confidence-Building Measures.” The meeting of two leader of course immediately aroused and drew close attention of the representatives of different countries. Moreover, the security situation of Afghanistan is a pressing issue for regional and global powers. Among other things, “Afghan issue” became a serious topic for discussion of the two leaders. The fact that the White House announced the development in the near future of a new US strategy for Afghanistan, but this document has not yet been voiced.

The Afghan strategy is one of the key aspects of US domestic policy, as it is an indicator that will offer this or that leadership, how it will continue to operate, to solve this issue. It is quite obvious that meeting with the Kazakh leader will be of great importance from the point of view of elaborating the American strategy for Afghanistan.

Most notably, it is fact of the moment that at present international community has practically withdrawn from the problems of this country. The UN mission records depressing statistics – the number of civilians killed in Afghanistan in 2017 from armed conflicts reached a record level of almost 18,000 people. This is the highest figure since the beginning of the war that is since 2001. Considering that Kazakhstan is an active regional participant and negotiator in conflict resolution, and also heads the UN Committee on Afghanistan and moderates the discussion of the Afghan issue, its possible proposals can be invaluable.

The Afghan problems in the last two or three years began to fall out of sight. The elections are carried on all the time, the number of victims among the population is still growing however, the visit of President Nazarbayev is believed to assist towards further progress for ensuring peace and stability and enduring solution of Afghan problem since, the issue has direct consequences for whole region including Kazakhstan which is also neighboring country of Afghanistan.

However, the Chairman of the Kazakhstan Council on Foreign Relations, well-known political analyst Yerlan Karin, views President Nazarbayev’s visit to the United States as “the most important event”, which is of great importance both for the future prospects of Kazakh-American cooperation and for determining the relationship between Central Asia and the US in the whole and, the role of the United States in this region. This will undoubtedly be important in the international context, since Kazakhstan has declared itself as an active participant in various international forums and discussions. The last vivid example is the Astana negotiation platform for Syria.

In the last, it would accurate to say that the countries with policies of peaceful co-existence can inspire many others to play constructive role in international politics without being indulged into the ambitions of acquiring power multiplier means and adhering to nuclear non-proliferation. The international communities’ recognition of Kazakhstan’s Presidency of the UN Security Council will undoubtedly raise the prestige of the UN and the Kazakhstan itself. However, such moves in the near future will allow the international community to wait for heated discussions and discussion of the accumulated problems over the years. The new chairman of the UN Security Council is set for a multi-vector peacekeeping dialogue and a role for conflict resolution.

Putting the Paris climate agreement into practice will trigger opposed reactions by investors on the one hand and fossil fuel owners on the other hand.

It has been feared that the anticipation of strong CO2 reduction policies might – a ‘green paradox’ – drive up these emissions: before the regulations kick in, fossil fuel owners might accelerate their resource extraction to maximize profits. Yet at the same time, investors might stop putting their money into coal power plants as they can expect their assets to become stranded.

Now for the first time a study investigates both effects that to date have been discussed only separately. On balance, divestment beats the green paradox if substantial carbon pricing is credibly announced, a team of energy economists finds. Consequently, overall CO2 emissions would be effectively reduced.

“Strong future climate policies can reduce emissions even before they come into effect if they are credibly announced,” said lead-author Nico Bauer from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). While the Paris agreement is weak in short-term policy ambition, with close to 200 countries committing themselves to limit temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, it will require strong climate policies in the future to reduce emissions over the longer term.

“We find that ten years before carbon pricing policies are actually introduced, investors start pulling their money out of the coal power sector,” said Bauer. “They shy away from investing in fossil fueled power plants as they realise that the lifetime during which these plants will make money will be curtailed by the future climate policy. We find this divestment reduces emissions by between 5 to 20 percent, depending on the strength of the climate policy, already in the time before the climate policy gets implemented.”

A price of 20 US-dollars per ton CO2 doubles the cost of using coal

Coal is particularly susceptible to carbon pricing. “Adding a carbon price of 20 US-dollars per ton of CO2 doubles the cost of using coal,” says co-author Christophe McGlade from University College London (UCL) and the International Energy Agency (IEA).

“Power sector investors see that coal power plants will become uncompetitive under carbon pricing and so shift their portfolios towards low-carbon sources of electricity.” McGlade added: “Oil is much less sensitive to carbon pricing. While we found that the green paradox effect can emerge in oil markets – with major oil resource holders boosting oil production because of fears their resources will be left stranded – this is likely to be much smaller than the divestment effect that reduces coal use.”

Computer simulations of energy markets’ future dynamics are commonly used to investigate the economic effects of policies.

“We ran our simulations with a variety of CO2 pricing levels, steadily reaching between 25 and 300 US-Dollars per ton CO2 by 2050, with a medium scenario reaching 100 US-Dollars. These taxes were introduced with a number of different delays to represent various degrees of climate policy stringency and credibility and see how fossil fuel markets react in anticipation of such climate policies,” said co-author Jérôme Hilaire from PIK and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC).

He added: “This is to account for uncertainties, but the divestment effect prevails over the green paradox effect in almost all tax cases investigated regardless of the implementation delay, and therefore decreases overall emissions. Only if CO2 pricing starts very late, for example not before 2050, and then at a very low level, anticipation by market forces leads to an increase in CO2 emissions instead of a decrease.”

Pricing emissions in China, the EU, UK, Canada, and even in California

“Our results hinge on some crucial assumptions – that policymakers can commit to introducing strong climate policies several years into the future, that the carbon pricing is uniform across regions, that investors believe the policy-makers will do what they say they will do, and that investors are shrewd in adapting their investment strategies accordingly,” said co-author Paul Ekins from UCL, who is also a member of the European Union Commission’s High-Level Panel on Decarbonisation Pathways.

If different CO2 pricing regulations at different price levels were to be introduced in different countries, the authors find that while some emissions-intensive production facilities move from places of high regulation to those with low standards, this effect is limited.

“CO2 emissions pricing schemes are emerging in China, the EU is currently in the processes of fixing its trading scheme, and CO2 prices are in place in the UK, in Chile, in Canada, and even in California, the sixth-largest economy in the world. The Paris agreement delivered a strong signal that policy makers take climate change seriously and are ready and willing to deliver on the necessary emissions reductions. By anticipating the implementation of policies to tackle climate change, market forces will likely reduce emissions, helping us on the first step towards achieving deep emissions reductions – as long as the policy signals are strong, clear and credible.”

Fresh off passing massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, Trump and congressional Republicans want to use the deficit they’ve created to justify huge cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

As House Speaker Paul Ryan says “We’re going to have to get… at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit.”

Don’t let them get away with it.

Social Security and Medicare are critical safety-nets for working and middle-class families.

Before they existed, Americans faced grim prospects. In 1935, the year Social Security was enacted, roughly half of America’s seniors lived in poverty.  By the 1960s poverty among seniors had dropped significantly, but medical costs were still a major financial burden and only half of Americans aged 65 and over had health insurance. Medicare fixed that, guaranteeing health care for older Americans.

Today less than 10 percent of seniors live in poverty and almost all have access to health care. According to an analysis of census data, Social Security payments keep an estimated 22 million Americans from slipping into poverty.

Medicaid is also a vital lifeline for America’s elderly and the poor. Yet the Trump administration has already started whittling it away by encouraging states to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients.

Republicans like to call these programs “entitlements,” as if they’re some kind of giveaway.  But Americans pay into Social Security and Medicare throughout their entire working lives. It’s Americans’ own money they’re getting back through these programs.

These vital safety nets should be strengthened, not weakened. How?

1. Lift the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security tax. Currently, top earners only pay Social Security taxes on the first $120,000 of their yearly income. So the rich end up, in effect,  paying a lower Social Security tax rate than everyone else. Lifting the ceiling on what wealthy Americans contribute would help pay for the Baby Boomers retirements and leave Social Security in good shape for Millennials.

2. Allow Medicare to negotiate with drug companies for lower prescription drug prices. As the nation’s largest insurer, Medicare has tremendous bargaining power. Why should Americans pay far more for drugs than people in any other country?

3. Finally, reduce overall health costs and create a stronger workforce by making Medicare available to all. There’s no excuse for the richest nation in the world to have 28 million Americans still uninsured.

We need to not just secure, but revitalize Social Security and these other programs for our children, and for our children’s children.  Millennials just overtook Baby Boomers as our nation’s largest demographic.  For them — for all of us — we need to say loud and clear to all of our members of congress:  Hands off Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Expand and improve these programs: don’t cut them.

Okay, let’s suppose you hate Mexicans, Haitians, Hondurans, and all the other foreigners trying to get out of their wretched places and into the USA—obviously lots of people do hate them. So naturally you want the authorities to take whatever measures they deem necessary to keep these people out—walls, border thugs, internal checkpoints, whatever it takes. Okay, so far, so good (given your hateful values).

Except that this “benefit” you want the government to give you has a cost. And I’m not referring merely to the scores of billions of taxpayer dollars it will pour into its “secure the borders” rat holes. I’m thinking of the way in which the government will extend its police/surveillance systems into every nook and cranny of the USA—into every employer’s business, into every financial transaction, into every movement of vehicles on the highways, into every email or snail mail that is sent, into what is said in private houses and apartments themselves (the cops are already equipped with the listening technology).

So, as Kant taught, he who wills the ends wills the means, inescapably. To satisfy your hatred of disagreeable aliens, you are asking for the government to turn the USA into a police state on steroids. Are you really willing to pay this price to sate your bigotry?

This article was published at The Beacon.

By Gonzalo Escribano*

During the first year of his term in office, President Trump has fulfilled, one after another, at least many of the electoral promises included in his America First Energy Plan, forcing a 180-degree turnaround from the energy policy of President Obama. The declared objective of this strategy is to achieve US energy dominance, a kind of carbon (or fossil fuel) supremacy that has taken over, at least symbolically, many important US energy policy measures. Immediately following his swearing in, Trump signed executive orders allowing both the Keystone XL and Dakota Access (DAPL) pipelines to proceed. More than representing simply an important economic decision, these executive orders served as a declaration of Trump’s intentions, particularly given the media context in which these fossil fuel infrastructures had generated significant public opposition. Trump requested that the promoters of the Keystone XL –which had been blocked by Obama– present the project to the government again; and when they did, this time it was approved. He also ordered that the DAPL –halted by Obama after three months of opposition and protest, resume construction– and by mid-year the pipeline was transporting oil.

Also among the first measures taken by President Trump was the decision to reverse the recent prohibition against drilling in the Arctic and the Atlantic oceans, which had been approved at the last minute by the Obama Administration. This energy policy change was also mainly symbolic: there is a certain consensus that such measures will have very limited real effects, given that even after the increase in oil prices during recent months the exploitation of the Arctic remains unprofitable, in particular relative to the fracking of shale oil. In September, the Washington Post revealed that the Trump Administration was maneuvering to allow for hydrocarbon exploration to proceed in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for the first time in 30 years. This measure, recently approved, is another high-profile blow in the decades-long policy battle between the environmentalists and native-American tribes, supported by the Democrats, on the one side, and the political leaders of the State of Alaska, supported by the Republicans in the Congress, who want to exploit these petroleum resources, on the other.

The next shift in energy policy came in March when the Clean Power Plan (CPP) –another flagship of the Obama Administration’s energy policy– was suspended. The President signed an executive order calling for the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to begin to dismantle the CPP –which had been projected to reduce GHG emissions in the electricity sector by requiring states to reduce CO2 emissions from gas and coal-fired plants by 32% in 2030 (when compared with 2005)–. In fact, however, it was once again a nearly symbolic decision, given that the CPP had never entered into effect. During 2018 the EPA will need to replace the regulation approved by the Obama Administration and set new emissions standards. The year has begun with an important defeat for the Trump Administration, however: on January 8, 2018, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) rejected the petition of the Department of Energy to establish a model for compensation of nuclear and coal plants for their energy storage and grid resilience capacities. That proposal has been interpreted as a clear subsidy to both technologies, given that other technologies, like wind and solar (and to some extent gas), do not have this possibility because of the high cost and their limited capacity for storage.

A varied range of arguments have been used to reduce the perceived significance of such measures, and while most of them are valid, sometimes they are stretched. Most of them point out that the shift in energy policy has been more declarative than substantively real, and that its impact will be limited. It is true that, at this stage, the reduction in the costs of renewable energies have made the transition in the US electricity sector almost inevitable. The policies of President Trump will not easily reverse the trend of the energy transition taken up by the US towards a combination of gas and renewable energies, supported by new electricity storage systems and smart grids. The interests of business and the regulatory capacity of the states, especially those where the voters support renewable energy either for economic reasons (for example, as in Texas) or out of environmental preference (as in California) represent important counterweights in this regard. But it is evident that Trump’s policies will slow down the transition and make it somewhat more expensive (than it needs to be). In the same way, the defeat inflicted by the FERC to the proposal for hidden subsidies to coal and nuclear energy show that the institutional counterweights and checks do limit the space in which President Trump’s energy policy can unfold. On the contrary, however, although the regulators continue to act to displace coal-fired plants from the U.S. electricity mix for reasons of cost, they can only expect obstacles from the Trump Administration.

But the culmination of the abrupt shift in the Trump Administration’s energy policy and its aspirations to energy supremacy was made especially visible by the Administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. The Administration has also begun to turn its back on the US’s financial obligations to the UN’s Sustainable Development Objectives. Furthermore, Trump’s unilateralism has affected other key mechanisms of global energy governance, precisely when such mechanisms are needed even more to undertake an orderly energy transition in economic and geopolitical terms. The clearest example of this has been the response of the Trump Administration to the agreement between OPEC and Russia, along with other oil producers, to maintain the production cuts in order to stimulate a recovery of oil prices. The President announced that he would carry out another of his electoral promises to unilaterally sell off half of the US’s strategic oil reserves, irrespective of the rules of the International Energy Agency (IEA) in this regard, revealing that Trump’s lack of interest in the fight against climate change, or in environmental protection, also extends to his attitude toward multilateral energy cooperation.

The risks to US energy security stemming from this unilateralism nearly materialised in August with the arrival at the shores of Texas of Hurricane Harvey, which paralysed the offshore production of the Gulf of Mexico and the shale production of Eagle Ford, as well as nearly 30% of the refining capacity of the country. The impact on prices, and the related scenarios of shortages, were only temporary, but they produced some fear of a repeat of the situation in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina obliged the US to appeal to the solidarity of the members of the IEA to release some of their strategic reserves. Although in the end it was not necessary to call on the cooperation mechanisms of the IEA, the mere possibility of having to do so placed the unilateralism of Trump, along with its contradictions, plainly in disturbing view of the mirror. Tensions with multilateralism have also been apparent in the commercial field: the White House will need to decide before the end of January whether or not to apply additional tariffs or other commercial measures to the imports of Chinese solar panels. The first protectionist decision of President Trump could in this way affect the whole of the energy sector. Other cases related to the energy sector remain unresolved, like the commercial tariffs facing imports of steel (used in oil and gas pipelines) or the implications of an eventual renegotiation of NAFTA.

It must be clarified that what explains US energy leadership is not energy nationalism as much as an energy ecosystem characterised by deep markets that stimulate business dynamism in both hydrocarbons and renewable energies. The impressive increase in the production and export of US crude oil illustrates perfectly the limits to energy isolationism of the kind proposed by Trump’s campaign. In 2015 the Obama Administration eliminated the ban on petroleum exports, a decision which candidate Trump opposed, but during 2017 a wave of oil exports was unleashed. It is true that part of this increase was due to the effects of Hurricane Harvey, which forced crude oil to be exported in the face of widespread refinery closings, but the data continues to be revealing: between January and June of 2017 the US exported on average 750,000 barrels a day of petroleum, a figure which was doubled during the last quarter of the year and which made the country one of the largest oil exporters in the world. Production levels are also rising, and with the higher price ranges now expected for oil, the projections for 2018 continue to rise. The policies which have produced this phenomenon were already in place before the arrival of President Trump, and despite having campaigned in favour of returning to the prohibition against US petroleum exports in the name of ‘America First’, it is one of the few star measures from his campaign program that has been forgotten in practical terms, and even rhetorically. This absence is probably the most notable and revealing limitation of his America First Energy Plan.

In business terms, the most relevant measure arrived at the end of last year, when Congress approved a tax reform which reduced the tax rate on companies from 35% to 21%, with energy companies among the principal beneficiaries. In addition to a reduction in the tax rate, the tax legislation allows for the deduction of capital invested in the year in which the investment is made, which will lower even further the tax burden on the energy sector, stimulate investment and push up business profits. In the field of renewable energy, one of the great fears of the sector has been the future of the renewable energy tax incentives, which finally were preserved and have now contributed to moderating uncertainty with respect to the future of renewables. This business component of the America First Energy Plan, and not its unilateralist, protectionist and fossil fuel rhetoric, is what rescues the first year of the energy policy of President Trump. It remains to be seen up to what point this component is capable of resisting the tensions between different business interests. At a certain point, the Trump Administration will need to decide whether to honour campaign promises or to follow the dynamics of business and the market, as well as those of the domestic (and multilateral) institutions which shape the realities facing US energy policy.

About the author:
*Gonzalo Escribano, Director of the Energy Programme, Elcano Royal Institute | @g_escribano

Source:
This article was published by Elcano Royal Institute

By Maryam Salari

Turkey has always played an important and effective role in control or relative containment of the crisis in Syria. One of the most important goals pursued by Turkey in Syria is to keep in check the increasing role of the Syrian Kurds in areas close to the country’s border due to Ankara’s concern about a possible union between Syrian Kurdish groups and those in Turkey. However, the main factor that has prompted Turkey to choose the current juncture for carrying out military operations in Syria’s Afrin region is the special importance of the current juncture.

Turkey has chosen this juncture for a number of reasons. The first reason is that a meeting of Syrian opposition groups to discuss a possible solution to the country’s crisis is going to be held soon in Russia’s resort city of Sochi. This meeting will be held through mediation of Moscow and all Syrian groups, including the Kurdish groups are to play an active role in it. Therefore, Ankara is trying to influence the forthcoming meeting in Sochi through its ongoing operations in Afrin. The leaders of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party have always been opposed to Kurds playing an effective role in shaping the political structure in a new Syria. Therefore, during past few years, they had consistently opposed the leaders of Syria’s Kurdish groups from being invited to take part in Syria peace talks in the Swiss city of Geneva. During the past months, they have also frequently voiced their dissatisfaction about the invitation extended to Syria’s Kurdish groups to take part in the Russia-mediated Sochi peace talks.

Another factor that has caused Turkey to attack Afrin at the present time is a longstanding effort by Ankara to undermine the peace process in Syria. Turkey is not yet satisfied with new conditions regarding the Syrian government and stabilization of President Bashar Assad’s power and this is why it still continues to oppose the incumbent Syrian regime. An example of Ankara’s opposition to Assad was seen in an African tour by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which he openly talked about the need to change the Syrian regime. Since the forthcoming negotiations in Sochi can be an important step towards national reconciliation in Syria and further strengthening of Assad’s standing, Ankara is trying through this preemptory measure to prevent restoration of stability to Syria.

The third factor behind Turkey’s ongoing operations in northern Syria is the role that Ankara is playing on behalf of the United States in this region. Under conditions when Washington is not very willing to openly intervene in the Syria crisis, its regional allies, including Turkey, can play this role. Therefore, contrary to the apparent verbal conflict that is going on between Ankara and Washington, there is remarkable coordination between the two countries in this regard. At the present time, it seems that Ankara has been given guarantees by the United States about being secure to possible moves by pro-US Kurdish forces and, as a result, it is implementing its own intervention scenario in order to prevent stabilization of the political conditions in Syria.

On the whole, although these operations seem to be a tactical measure taken by Turkey, they prove absence of fixed principles in a Turkey, which is known across the region for its profiteering nature and sinusoidal moves. The policy of attacking Afrin also speaks volumes about Turkey’s unpreparedness to adapt itself to new conditions in Syria and indicates Ankara’s great concern about increasing power of Turkey’s regional allies, including Iran and Russia. At the same time, Turkey has never followed a stable regional policy with regard to countries like Iran and Russia as well as the Zionist regime of Israel. Therefore, excessive pragmatism and avoidance of sticking to clear principles have caused Turkey to ignore some previous agreements and implement a new plan in order to gain some technical achievements. However, this measure, like other measures that Turkey has already taken in Syria, is unlikely to be of any good to Ankara. In short-term, the only result of these operations is increased tensions in Syria and across region, and new regional initiatives are expected in order to establish renewed balance in this region.

*These views represent those of the author and are not necessarily Iran Review’s viewpoints.

Organizational downsizing and job loss greatly increase the risk of starting various medications. Drugs prescribed for mental health issues are particularly widespread.

“Individuals who are affected by depression are far more likely to start taking medications than others,” said Silje Lill Kaspersen, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and SINTEF, Scandinavia’s largest independent research institute.

And it seems that measures to facilitate more sustained employment for workers with health issues aren’t working well enough. Sick people lose their jobs more often than those who are well.

Kaspersen is the first author of three studies that deal with the relationship between downsizing, unemployment and health. Three million Norwegian employees are part of the database used a source for the investigations.

Taken together, the three studies have yielded some eye-opening results that have not previously been shown using Norwegian data.

Sudden increase in drug use

Drug use already begins to rise among employees a year before a private business begins to cut staff. This trend applies especially to the time just before and after the downsizing takes place.

Kaspersen noted that individuals are almost three times as likely to start taking antidepressants in the month before being laid off compared to earlier periods in their life when they were employed.

This behavior correlates with the one- to three-month pink slip notification period before the actual layoff date. The risk of starting medication also increases while the employee is unemployed.

Norwegian workers appear to react to the stress of downsizing and layoffs by seeking medical advice and being prescribed drugs for depression, anxiety, insomnia and cardiovascular conditions.

“We compared employees to themselves over several years, and one uplifting finding in our unemployment and drug use study was that the risk of starting to take medication isn’t that elevated when people go back to work after being unemployed for a while,” Kaspersen said.

Health initiatives need to start early

“Our findings can help inform when it would be helpful to put preventive measures in place in a downsizing process. We should probably think of employee health early on in that process,” said Kaspersen.

Since drug use increases well before actual job loss, various health initiatives should also start beforehand.

“We still don’t know exactly which measures would be the most appropriate,” said Professor Johan Håkon Bjørngaard at NTNU’s Department of Public Health and Nursing. He is a co-author of all the studies.

Many businesses that reduce their workforce cannot afford to prioritize comprehensive health initiatives, such as corporate health services for laid off employees.

“A business manager who has to inform employees about staffing cuts can use our findings to get an idea what reactions to expect from some of the affected employees,” said Kaspersen. She believes that taking action to safeguard employees during this process can be a good idea for businesses.

Then employees will be better prepared at a time when they need to be healthy and able to quickly start seeking new jobs.

“Women and men are affected about equally by staff reductions in the private sector,” said Bjørngaard.

Staff reductions also result in increased use of insulin, thyroid and cardiovascular drugs among affected workers. This may simply be related to the fact that people seek out a doctor when they feel stressed about their work situation, and the doctors then discover other important medical conditions at the same time.

Correlates both ways

“You can ask what comes first: the layoff or the illness. But the studies found a connection both ways,” said Fredrik Carlsen, professor at NTNU’s Department of Economics.

Investigating the cause and effect in both directions strengthens the studies. One of the three studies considered the effect of health on future unemployment.

People who already have health problems also eventually become unemployed to a greater degree than healthy workers. Among those who get three or more different diagnoses while they’re still working, the risk of becoming unemployed increases considerably.

For people with anxiety and depression, the risk of being unemployed increased by 57 per cent over a 14-year period.

“We don’t seem to have succeeded in providing people with an equal degree of good job opportunities,” said Carlsen.

This is becoming increasingly important as an ever-growing number of workers reach retirement age and an ever-smaller proportion of the population is part of the workforce.

Implementing multiple different initiatives can increase the opportunities for people to continue working longer or enable those outside the workforce to return. Despite these measures, people who become ill are still at far greater risk of losing their jobs.

This part of the survey tracked 36 000 people who participated in the extensive HUNT2 health survey in Nord-Trøndelag county in the mid-1990s, and linked 14 years of data from Norway’s National Insurance Database to the HUNT questionnaire data.

Three million included

Two of the articles from Kaspersen’s doctoral research were based on data for the entire Norwegian working population during 2004 to 2012 and included more than three million workers. This material provides more overarching answers.

In order to obtain detailed information at the individual level, the researchers specifically looked at private companies that downsized their staff by at least 25 per cent. This was done to ensure that organizational downsizing, and not reorganization, was the actual reason for laying off employees. In the period 2004 to 2012, more than 144 000 employees and 8 000 businesses fell into this category. Accessing all the data took over two years and required approval from seven government agencies.

Public enterprises are affected to a lesser extent by downsizing, where changes often occur in the form of reorganization instead. It can be assumed that reorganization may have similar health effects, but this was not investigated at this time.

While most treatments for Alzheimer’s disease focus on improving memory, researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center conducted a study aimed at slowing the decline of problem solving and decision-making skills in these patients.

Thin electrical wires were surgically implanted into the frontal lobes of the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease to determine if using a brain pacemaker could improve cognitive, behavioral, and functional abilities in patients with this form of dementia.

The deep brain stimulation (DBS) implant is similar to a cardiac pacemaker device, except that the pacemaker wires are implanted in specific regions of the brain rather than the heart. This is the first use of DBS in Alzheimer’s disease in a behavioral regulation brain region target.

Findings of the study are published online in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

“We have many memory aids, tools and pharmaceutical treatments to help Alzheimer’s patients with memory, but we don’t have anything to help with improving their judgments, making good decisions, or increasing their ability to selectively focus attention on the task at hand and avoid distractions. These skills are necessary in performing daily tasks such as making the bed, choosing what to eat and having meaningful socializing with friends and family,” said Dr. Douglas Scharre, co-author of the study and director of the Division of Cognitive Neurology at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center’s Neurological Institute.

“The frontal lobes are responsible for our abilities to solve problems, organize and plan, and utilize good judgments. By stimulating this region of the brain, the Alzheimer’s subjects cognitive and daily functional abilities as a whole declined more slowly than Alzheimer’s patients in a matched comparison group not being treated with DBS,” he said.

The pilot study found that DBS targeting frontal brain regions can reduce the overall performance decline typically seen in people with mild or early stage Alzheimer’s, Scharre said.

Scharre is a neurologist who focuses on treating patients with Alzheimer’s and other dementias. He collaborated with Dr. Ali Rezai, a neurosurgeon who specializes in neuromodulation, to conduct this clinical trial.

“This same technology has been successfully used to treat more than 135,000 patients worldwide with Parkinson’s disease. Our findings suggest that frontal network modulation to improve executive and behavioral deficits should be further studied in patients with Alzheimer’s disease,” said Rezai, the former director of Ohio State’s Neurological Institute who is now leading the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute at West Virginia University.

All three study participants showed improvement, including LaVonne Moore, 85, of Delaware, Ohio. When she entered the study in 2013, she was not doing any meal preparation. After two years of deep-brain stimulation, she could independently initiate preparations of a simple meal, assemble ingredients and cook the meal.

She was able to organize an outing, including arranging transportation and destination, planning for the weather and bringing the needed money. She also regained independence to select her clothing attire, researchers noted.

Her 89-year-old husband, Tom Moore, said her Alzheimer’s disease has progressed, but more slowly than he expected.

“LaVonne has had Alzheimer’s disease longer than anybody I know, and that sounds negative, but it’s really a positive thing because it shows that we’re doing something right,” Moore said. She didn’t hesitate to volunteer for the study, he added.

He said she told him: “I will do anything to help others not go through what I’m going through.”

Next, Ohio State researchers want to explore non-surgical methods to stimulate the frontal lobe, which would be a less invasive treatment option to slow down the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of degenerative dementia, affecting more than 5 million Americans. By 2050, this number could rise as high as 16 million, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

The disease – which has no cure and is not easily managed – becomes progressively disabling with loss of memory, cognition and worsening behavioral function, in addition to a gradual loss of independent functioning, Scharre said.

Funding for this study was provided by The Ohio State University Center for Neuromodulation, the Wright Center of Innovation in Biomedical Imaging, OTF-TECH-11-044 and philanthropic donations.

A study done at Karlstad University shows that seven products account for almost half the fruit and vegetables wasted by retailers. Potentially, food waste can be drastically limited by focusing on these products.

“Retailers may profit by allocating more staff hours to measures that lead to reduced fruit and vegetable waste, thereby saving money and the environment,” said Lisa Mattsson at Karlstad University.

Today food waste involves not only wasted natural resources, but also financial losses. A growing population means that all actors in society – business, government agencies and citizens – have to handle food better to decrease the amounts that are wasted.

A few products account for half of the waste costs

Less food is wasted in retail than in households, but retailers also waste large amounts of food each year. In this study, the fruit and vegetable waste of three large retailers was analyzed based on quantity, economic costs and the impact on the climate.

The results show that seven categories of fruit and vegetable account for most of the waste as regards quantity, costs and the impact on the climate. These seven products are bananas, apples, tomatoes, salad, sweet peppers, pears and grapes. Together, these products account for almost 50% of what food waste cost the retailers. Focusing on decreasing the waste of these products could therefore potentially have great effects.

Waste reduction strategies are profitable

Most of the costs associated with food waste, around 85%, are related to the products themselves. The cost of waste management, such as emptying and removing waste, amounts to around 6%, while the staff hours spent removing products from the shelves, recording waste and disposing of products represent another 9% of the total cost.

Since staff hours are a relatively small part in comparison to the cost of the products themselves, increasing staff hours to reduce food waste has much potential. A cost-benefit analysis showed that the costs incurred to double the amount of time staff spend on waste reduction measures, would be the equivalent of a 10% reduction in fruit and vegetable waste.

Chances are that most local people know who was behind the murder. But silence about what is widely known is a Balkans trait and is probably thought to be the safest tactic in the north where everyone knows who must be obeyed. In Mitrovica, purely political messages may be delivered by grenades that go off in the night and hurt no one, not by murder. Whatever the case, real justice may never be done.

By Gerard M. Gallucci*

A Mitrovica friend of mine told me that the murder of Oliver Ivanović “is big loss for all of us here. That is Serbian tragedy, we always figure what we have once we lose that!” At his Belgrade funeral, Oliver’s wife said she and her son would not be returning to Mitrovica “the town of fear, darkness and pain.” Oliver, she said, “gave his life for Kosovo and for Serbdom, and when he pleaded for help, asked for protection, there was nobody there. Now they say he is a hero, but where were those people who are praising him now when we needed them the most.” Oliver’s lawyer added that “it would have been good if the thousands of people who are bidding farewell to Oliver today had voted for him…. Then he would have been [Mitrovica’s] mayor.”

Oliver Ivanović was a good man in a tough place. I and many of the other internationals who worked with him in Kosovo over the years knew him as a capable politician working to find space for the accommodation between Kosovo Serbs and Albanians that he knew was necessary for the well-being of his community as well as for progress for Kosovo. Yes, he did originally serve as a leader of the Bridge Watchers, the Mitrovica Serbs who in 1999 sought to keep the Albanians from over-running the north. But he realized early that there were smarter ways to protect and serve his community by working with the internationals and with the Albanians. He served in the government in Pristina before the 2008 declaration of independence and in the Serbian government afterwards. He ran for mayor of Mitrovica and lost but was ready to try again despite the trumped up EU effort to convict him for war crimes. Along the way he became a target for local Serb hardliners who preferred confrontation and lost the support of the Belgrade government that sought to keep the status of the north frozen in order to have a chip in its negotiations with Pristina over the final status of Kosovo. Oliver also clearly became a troubling thorn in the side of the crime network that is the only genuinely inter-ethnic activity in Kosovo. His vacant car was twice the object of warning attacks. In his upcoming campaign for mayor, he would have continued to push for efforts against drug trafficking.

Reactions to Oliver’s murder – in a drive-by, mafia-style hit – have been predictable. Everyone says how sorry they are and then add their own spin. The Serbian government – crying crocodile tears – called it a terrorist act, hinted at a Kosovo Albanian agenda and immediately used it as an excuse to pull out of a negotiating session. Then, having extracted a little leverage, it agreed with Pristina that it would continue to work for peace. The Albanians promised a thorough investigation and suggested blame laid with tensions in the Serbian community. The EU, US and the other internationals joined the chorus of condemnation. News reports couldn’t help but rehash the war crimes charges.

In Kosovo, various entities have some responsibility for rule of law. Under UNSCR 1244, it is the UN, which lends its mandate to the EU which sort of oversees the Pristina institutions. Serbia retains its claim and has a presence in Serb areas north and south. With such overlapping rule-of-law actors, Kosovo ends up with many lawless nooks and crannies where criminals can thrive. The criminals like it that way. Chances are that most local people know who was behind the murder. But silence about what is widely known is a Balkans trait and is probably thought to be the safest tactic in the north where everyone knows who must be obeyed. My guess would be the crime organization with perhaps some sort of quiet nod from someone in authority. In Mitrovica, purely political messages may be delivered by grenades that go off in the night and hurt no one, not by murder. It’s also possible that some hardline Serbian nationalists were responsible and perhaps, least likely in my view, the Albanians. Whatever the case, real justice may never be done.

Requiescat in pace, Oliver Ivanović. Stand up North Mitrovica?

*Gerard M. Gallucci is a retired US diplomat and UN peacekeeper. He worked as part of US efforts to resolve the conflicts in Angola, South Africa and Sudan and as Director for Inter-American Affairs at the National Security Council. He served as UN Regional Representative in Mitrovica, Kosovo from July 2005 until October 2008 and as Chief of Staff for the UN mission in East Timor from November 2008 until June 2010. He has a PhD in political science, taught at the University of Pittsburgh, University of Arkansas, George Washington University and Drake University and now works as an independent consultant.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of TransConflict.

By Shihoko Goto*

(FPRI) — As corporate titans from the world gathered at Davos, it should have not been a surprise that U.S. President Donald Trump would choose the Swiss Alps as the venue to tone down his hostility towards multilateral trade deals. Having campaigned vigorously against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and multilateral pacts in general, Trump suggested at the World Economic Forum last week that he might reconsider being part of the TPP under the right conditions. For trade analysts, though, the immediate concerns are less about what changes may be made to accommodate the White House’s renewed interest in the world’s most ambitious trade agreement to date that is re-emerging without the United States. Rather, the focus is on how the TPP will continue moving forward without Washington to ensure that global growth remains steady. Most importantly, perhaps, is that there is now a concrete roadmap to see how firm U.S. allies can begin making a world without Washington a reality.

For the executives, political leaders, and big thinkers gathered at Davos, this year’s annual meeting was undoubtedly an opportunity to congratulate themselves on steering the global economy on a steady, upward trajectory. The U.S. stock market’s remarkable performance over the past year has been thrilling for investors, but bourses from Japan to Europe and China as well as Russia have all been faring well. In fact, economies across the board are growing at a steady clip, which is a marked turnaround from the financial crisis the world had confronted a decade ago.

The camaraderie among the international elite at Davos would seemingly ensure that greater cooperation and coordination to mitigate risks is on the upswing. Establishing rules that would not only allow further growth—but also allow hedging against shocks in one particular region—is a common objective for the investing class. For the Davos set, coordinating and cooperating more on the economic front would be de rigeur. Yet, one of the prevailing themes at the Swiss forum was about the gains made over the past decade being hurt or even wiped out as a result of a trade war based on economic nationalism. One of the most articulate voices expressing such concerns was Alibaba’s Jack Ma, who warned, “It’s so easy to launch a trade war, but it’s so difficult to stop the disaster of this war.”

In such a climate, President Trump’s seeming change of heart about multilateral trade deals and the TPP in particular was somewhat reassuring. Still, stating that “I would do TPP if we were able to make a substantially better deal,” without clarifying what exactly was lacking in the deal has left many scratching their heads about whether or not he actually would be open to getting back into the deal—assuming that the conditions were acceptable to the White House. Moreover, his comment that bilateral trade deals were preferable to multilateral agreements “because if you have a problem, you terminate” them hardly sounded like a comment that would push the United States back in. So given the vagueness of the administration, the U.S. president’s latest comments about TPP is unlikely to derail the agreement that is now gathering steam.

U.S. withdrawal from the trade agreement a year ago was seemingly the death knell for TPP. Yet, since then, the remaining 11 countries led by Japan have continued to press forward with taking the deal across the finish line. Expectations are high that the TPP11—which is in essence the same content as the original deal—could actually be signed as early as March. These expectations are a testament to the strength of the pact. Its ambitions to go far beyond a traditional trade deal and focus much more on reducing non-tariff barriers and to address issues that have hitherto been neglected by trade agreements, including intellectual property rights and dealing with state-owned enterprises, is certainly attractive to the 11 countries, namely Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Brunei, Vietnam, Malaysia, Chile, Peru, Mexico, and Canada. For Mexico and Canada, which continue to renegotiate NAFTA with the United States, moving ahead with TPP11 will give both countries more leverage, not to mention political support, in dealing with a U.S. administration that remains fixated on reducing bilateral trade deficits above all else.

Equally important is the political momentum stemming from TPP11’s advancement. Much has been made about U.S. withdrawal from the TPP signaling Washington’s weakened commitment to remain an Asian power. Meanwhile, China’s growing ambitions to consolidate its position as Asia’s biggest economic, political, and military power, and the role the Belt and Road Initiative plays in making that a reality have come under close scrutiny. But the steady regeneration of the TPP even without the United States signals perhaps a much more steady, and perhaps more sustainable, approach to the shift in political realities to fill the vacuum the United States has left behind. The TPP11 has made clear that the world can indeed move on without Washington, but there are also alternatives to Chinese-led visions for growth.

About the author:
*Shihoko Goto is the senior Northeast Asia associate at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia Program, where she is responsible for research, programming, and publications on Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

By Ryan McMaken*

In one of her more incoherent columns in 2011, Ann Coulter attacked then-presidential candidate Ron Paul for his laissez-faire position on marriage. Coulter praised government regulations imposed on marriage, stating that Paul’s position is “chicken-s**t” and “[t]here are reasons we have laws governing important institutions, such as marriage. As in landscaping, it’s never a good idea to remove a wall until you know why it was put there.”

Specifically, Coulter praised government mandated blood tests for marrying couples, stating “Under Paul’s plan, siblings could marry one another.”

This statement was apparently intended as some sort of great “gotcha” comment. “Why, if it weren’t for government, we’d all marry our sisters!” is the implied sentiment.

Coulter’s comment may seem like ancient history at this point, but her statement’s publication in major media outlets illustrates that even in recent years, many Americans still seem to be under the impression that mandatory blood tests are relatively common in the United States.

They aren’t. At least, they aren’t anymore.

Like so many invasive procedures mandated by governments, mandatory blood tests for couples seeking marriage licenses were a product of the age of eugenics and Progressive politics — two things that often go together.

As Ruth C. Engs notes in The Progressive Era’s Health Reform Movement: “‘Racial improvement’ through positive eugenics, such as marriage to a healthy individual, [and] blood tests for syphilis prior to marriage … were promoted for improving the ‘race,’ thus leading to a healthier nation.”

The rights of individuals to marry whom they wished was thus swept aside in the name of “hygiene” and public health. Blood tests took their place along with prohibitions on interracial marriage as a means of “racial improvement.”

Today, though, only one state — Montana — continues to require blood tests. Between 1980 and 2008, the remaining requirement for blood tests were abolished as certain elements of the Progressive public health philosophy lost influence, and as the perceived benefits of mandated blood tests were clearly far less than thought.

Kasey S. Buckles, Melanie Guldi, and Joseph Price provide a concise summary of the movement:

Historically, many states have required applicants for a marriage license to obtain a blood test. These tests were for venereal diseases (most commonly syphilis), for genetic disorders (such as sickle-cell anemia), or for rubella. The tests for syphilis were part of a broad public health campaign enacted in the late 1930s by U.S. Surgeon General Thomas Parran. Parran argued that premarital testing was necessary to inform the potential marriage partner of the risk of contracting a communicable disease, and to reduce the risk of birth defects associated with syphilis. According to Brandt (1985), “by the end of 1938, twenty-six states had enacted provisions prohibiting the marriage of infected individuals.” Screenings for genetic disorders and for rubella were also implemented in the interest of minimizing the risk of genetic disease or birth defects in the couple’s offspring.

Buckles, et al., note that it soon became apparent that the cost of the mandate was very high and benefits were quite low:

In the case of syphilis, however, it was soon recognized that premarital blood testing was not a cost-effective way to screen for the disease. Despite reports that 10% of Americans were infected, only 1.34% of applicants in New York City’s first year of testing were found to have the disease. Brandt (1985) notes that a premarital exam was “not the optimal locus for screening,” since couples seeking to marry were not likely to be in the most at-risk groups, and individuals who knew they were infected could wait until the infection cleared to apply for a license. … Nationwide, couples spent over $80 million to reveal 456 cases.

By 2008, the requirements had nearly all disappeared:

We identified 34 states that had a BTR in 1980. Of these 34, 19 states repealed their law in the 1980s, 7 repealed in the 1990s, and 7 more repealed between 2000 and 2008, leaving only Mississippi with a BTR in 2009.

Nor was this all just a matter of deliberation over the medical efficacy of the laws. Ordinary people never appeared to be enthusiastic about the mandates, and many resented the additional hoops they needed to jump through to carry on with their personal lives.

It should surprise no one, then, that couples actively sought to avoid the costly and time-consuming test requirements.

Blood test requirements led to couples choosing to marry in states that did not have the mandates: “it appears that about one-third of the decrease in licenses is due to couples marrying out of state, while about two-thirds choose not to marry at all.”1

So, it turns out the mandated blood tests worked to discourage marriage while doing little to actually identify people with disease or improve public health.

The mandate was great for the medical industry, however, since it required the payment of many millions of dollars for otherwise unnecessary medical procedures.

Needless to say, mandatory blood tests are far less likely to uncover people married to their sisters than they are likely to uncover disease — regardless of what Ann Coulter may think.2 The cost of a government mandate to uncover genetic similarities of potential newlyweds would be immense, with virtually no payoff.

The fact that the arithmetic doesn’t work in its favor is just one reason to oppose mandatory blood tests. The right to free association and free contracting among people wishing to get married is also something to consider. Also important is the fact that making it difficult to get married — especially nowadays — will simply encourage fewer people to get married at all. The idea that these unmarried people will then abstain from having sex or birthing children, of course, is adorably cute.

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

Source:
This article was published by the MISES Institute.

Notes:
1. See Buckles, et al.

2. We might also note that Coulter’s claim that blood tests prevent in-family marriage is pure fantasy on her part. Even when the blood tests were mandated, they were there to test for disease. They weren’t there to test for possible incest. Moreover, genetic testing for family relations is much more expensive than disease screening, and would not be cost effective.  Coulter was either blissfully unaware of this fact in 2011, or was lying.

A US missile defence test carried out in Hawaii was unsuccessful, according to officials.

A SM-3 Block IIA missile was launched from an Aegis Ashore test site in Hawaii, but failed to shoot down an incoming dummy missile launched from an aircraft, an official told Reuters. CNN also reported on the failure, сiting several administration officials.

The missile is developed by the Raytheon Co and is used to target intermediate range missiles. It’s being worked on jointly with Japan.

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) did not comment on the outcome of the test, but confirmed that one had taken place. “The Missile Defense Agency and US Navy sailors manning the Aegis Ashore Missile Defense Test Complex (AAMDTC) conducted a live-fire missile flight test using a Standard-Missile (SM)-3 Block IIA missile launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility, Kauai, Hawaii, Wednesday morning,” Mark Wright, a spokesman for the MDA said.

The Pentagon has not publicly acknowledged the failure, however. If the failure is confirmed, it will mark the second unsuccessful test of the missile in the past year. In June, an intercept test also failed following a previous successful test in February.

North Korea, meanwhile, has ramped up its missile test launches. In September, it carried out its sixth and most powerful nuclear test yet.

During his first State of the Union address Wednesday, president Donald Trump said Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile program could “very soon” pose an acute danger to the US.

“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 so powerful that it will deter any acts of aggression by any other nation or anyone else,” he said.

A Southeast Asian woman charged with murdering Kim Jong Nam, the North Korean dictator’s estranged half-brother, was paid for performing pranks at a mall in the weeks prior to his killing, a Malaysian court heard Tuesday.

Indonesian Siti Aisyah received 400 ringgit (U.S. $102) in January 2017 after performing a series of pranks outside a Malaysian mall, lead investigator Wan Azirul Nizam Che Wan Aziz testified during cross examination.

Wan Azirul’s statement appears to bolster the defense claim that the woman was hoodwinked into believing that she was performing for a TV show when she helped smear a liquid substance on Kim’s face at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport 2 on Feb. 13, 2017.

Prosecutors were trying to prove that Siti, along with 29-year-old Vietnamese woman Doan Thi Huong, smeared the deadly VX nerve agent on Kim Jong Nam’s face after receiving training from North Korean agents.

But the women have pleaded not guilty, always maintaining through their lawyers that they believed they were being paid to perform a televised prank.

Defense lawyer Gooi Soon Seng told reporters after the conclusion of Wan Azirul’s testimony that Siti met a Malaysian taxi driver who introduced her to a North Korean national identified as James (also known as Ri Ji U).

“At the Pavilion mall, Siti Aisyah was asked to watch a prank show done by another person and, subsequently, Siti Aisyah performed three pranks on the day itself and the prank was recorded by James,” Gooi said.

Testifying for the prosecution in November, Wan Azirul said he had asked the North Korean embassy for permission to interview James, but did not receive an answer. James was one of three men deported to Pyongyang in March 2017 in a diplomatic tradeoff between the two nations at the same time Kim’s body was returned to the hermit kingdom.

Four other North Korean men who were seen on CCTV footage at the airport and were identified as suspects fled Malaysia hours after the attack that killed dictator Kim Jong Un’s estranged sibling.

Testimony

In court on Tuesday, Gooi asked Wan Azirul about Siti’s meeting with James, who was posing as a Japanese.

“I’m suggesting that taxi driver Kamarudin Masyod had approached the accused around 3 a.m. on Jan. 5, 2017, at the Beach Club in Kuala Lumpur,” Gooi said.

“I agree but I’m not sure of the dates,” Wan Azirul testified.

Gooi asked if the club meeting between Siti and Kamarudin was about an offer for Siti to act in a prank show and that the two met with James eight hours later at the mall.

“Yes, I agree,” Wan Azirul replied.

He also asked if Kamarudin had witnessed Siti practicing pranks that day.

“Yes, I agree,” the officer said.

As evidence, Gooi produced a photo showing Siti, James and Kamarudin at the mall together.

The trial is to resume on Feb. 8.

On Monday, Gooi questioned Wan Azirul about a meeting between Kim Jong Nam and a man identified as a “Korean-American based in Bangkok,” four days before the airport murder. The investigator told reporters he could not identify the man.

Wan Azirul confirmed that a laptop was sent to a forensics laboratory in Kuala Lumpur. He said it was last used on Feb. 9, 2017, but was unsure if Kim had passed along data to the man during the meeting or if the meeting was linked to the airport killing.

Gooi accused Wan Azirul of being evasive.

“Come on, you have a total lapse in memory?” he asked the witness, according to media reports. “You say you investigated but you’ve forgotten everything? Which hotel? What was this investigation for, if it wasn’t related to this case?”

Following Tuesday’s court session, Gooi expressed confidence in the defense case.

“Because so far we have not found anything that connects our client to the incident,” he said.

The spokesman of the Saudi-led Arab coalition, Col. Turki Al-Maliki, denied rumors circulated by some media outlets that Houthi militias managed to successfully target Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport, Saudi news agency SPA reported.

Al-Malki confirmed that it was rather a failed attempt by the Iran-backed militias to fire a ballistic missile toward an uninhabited desert.

He pointed out that the terrorist Houthi militias have admitted through their media outlets that they deliberately target civilians, in clear violation of international humanitarian law.

The Unites States Census Bureau announced last week that it will not include the term “Middle Eastern or North African” in its next census in 2020. The decision ensures that not even a diluted effort to count the number of Arabs in America will be conducted.

I worked as a volunteer with the US Census for many years beginning back in the 1980s, with the goal of adding the category of “Arab” to the national Census, which is conducted every 10 years. In fact, I spent so much time fighting to get it included that the Census gave me a certificate of gratitude for those efforts.

But, over the years, the American government has resisted making this change to the Census, which defines in specific detail the racial, economic and social lives of the American population, which currently stands at 323 million. The Census even had Arab activists on its payroll to write against me, rejecting my views.

The Census excludes Arabs, but includes as many as 29 other racial and ethnic groups, such as White, Black, Hispanic, Latino, Spanish Origin, American Indian, Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian, Other Pacific islander, German, African American, Mexican, Navajo, Asian Indian, Samoan, and Tongan.

Ironically, Arabs lobbied to be included in the white category, but that reflected the racism of the day, when Arabs were included along with others that were banned. Since Arabs were never given the opportunity to be identified for what they were, they chose to be included in a category that they hoped would minimize the increasing racism they experienced not just in American society, but from the US Government. In 1924, the US limited immigration of Asians and Arabs. That limitation was not overturned until 1965.

I have always believed Arabs should be identified in the Census for very specific reasons: Right now, no one knows how many Arabs actually live in the US, with estimates varying widely from 1.5 million (from Census data in which Arab Americans actually wrote in that they were Arab in a space marked “other” on the forms) to 4.5 million, which many Arabs believe is more accurate.

Why would Arabs want to be identified in an America that is so paranoid about Arabs, fueling anti-Arab racism and bigotry? Well, when you are identified in the Census, you are given special privileges as Americans. The federal government uses the data to draw electoral district boundaries in an effort to augment the vote of different ethnic groups.

In Illinois, for example, the US government created a specific congressional district that looks like two separate circles connected by a thin string. It’s one of the strangest drawn boundaries, but it is not unique. The intent was to draw a boundary that includes as many “Hispanics” as possible in order for them to gather their voting strength to elect their own representative to the US Congress. That principle extends not only to congressional districts, but also to local districts.

Additionally, the federal government distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in grant money to fund things such as cultural awareness and cultural identity based on race and religion. Because Arabs are not identified, they lose out here too.

Being identified also helps communities and law enforcement to define instances and patterns of racial discrimination. For example, in many American cities, local police are required to report the racial and ethnic makeup of individuals who are stopped for traffic violations in order to prevent minorities such as black people, Hispanics and Asians from being targeted by police agencies.

Many black people use the data to identify patterns of racial misconduct by police. But, because Arabs are not included in the census, municipalities are not mandated to report how many Arabs are arrested, stopped for traffic accidents or are involved in accusations of criminal activities. Are Arabs being targeted by racist policing agencies?

We can’t know because our absence from the Census prevents it.

In 2014, as a result of continued criticism from American Arabs like myself, the US Census decided to test the use of a compromise term: “Middle Eastern or North African,” rather than the more specific “Arab.” I objected but many national Arab American organizations, like the prestigious Arab American Institute, were in favor.

The Census announced its decision rejecting MENA on January 26, saying: “The 2020 Census race and ethnicity questions will… not include a separate Middle Eastern or North African category.”

Many American Arab activists made a mistake by not demanding the more specific category of “Arab” to be added to the Census. They may have believed they lacked the influence to successfully lobby for a dramatic change. They thought that a broader category of MENA would be a compromise that included Arabs unofficially and would result in larger numbers. Instead of just 4.5 million Arabs being identified, the MENA category would have included Arabs and non-Arabs from a broader region.

The battle for Arab rights in America continues. One day the majority of Arab Americans will be recognized for the good they do, rather than just for the bad a small minority does. We will be able to pressure the government for our share of the American system, demanding that districts be created to augment the Arab vote, not dilute it. We will be able to more forcefully identify acts of racism and discrimination and not be ignored. We will also be able to demand and receive our share of the hundreds of millions of dollars in funds that are taken from our tax dollars and given to everyone else but us.

By Frank Kane*

With so much at stake — the IPO is the centerpiece of the Vision 2030 strategy — and so many stakeholders — government, 65,000 employees and armies of advisers — it is not surprising that there is both a need to get the share sale right and a difference of opinion about how to do that.

At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos last week, Aramco was represented by its chairman and chief executive, as well as a number of senior executives, and a phalanx of actual or potential advisers. The debate about the company’s future was reflected in a series of background conversations, semi-official briefings and public statements.

So what can we say with certainty about the IPO? Two things came across loud and clear.

First, there is a commitment to get a share sale away this year. Khalid Al-Falih, Aramco chairman and Saudi Arabia’s energy minister, left the WEF in no doubt about this. “Aramco will be listed. There are no ifs and buts about it,” he said.

Al-Falih was also reported as saying the listing was “on schedule,” backing up other ministerial commitments that there would be an IPO of some sort this year.

Second, there was a commitment that financial markets would determine what price the Kingdom gets for Aramco. “The valuation is for the market to decide, not the company or the government,” Al-Falih said.

So there will be a sale of shares on a stock exchange at a market-determined price this year. That is as much as you can say for certain. After that, the debate begins in ernest, revolving around two questions: Where and how much?

Taking the second question first, some analysts interpreted Al-Falih’s comments about market-led pricing as a retreat from the official estimate of $2 trillion put on Aramco when the IPO was first announced in 2016.

Most analysts, using a variety of sophisticated financial analysis techniques, cast doubt on that figure and struggle to get it much above $1.5 trillion. The fear is that if the figure is substantially below the official estimate, the owners will decide against an IPO, scrapping the public sale and maybe opting for a private arrangement.

But Aramco has two variables in its favor that could help persuade markets the oil and gas giant is worth $2 trillion, or close enough to that figure to make little difference to the IPO. One is the oil price, which Aramco itself — as the traditional swing producer in global crude markets — goes a long way to setting. The trend, and most of the forecasts for 2018, remain upward.

The other is the estimate of Saudi Arabia’s reserves. These have been officially calculated at around the 260 billion barrel mark for at least the past decade, but two independent American organizations are working on a revised estimate.

The 260 billion barrel level is likely to be exceeded, though it is hard to say by how much. More oil at a higher market value translates directly into a higher corporate valuation for Aramco.

The other crucial question is: Where? On which market will Aramco list its shares? Again, the Saudi government is committed to the Saudi Stock Exchange, or Tadawul, for at least some of the IPO, but on the global front, the options multiply.

The accepted wisdom is that New York is vying with London for the right to stage the IPO, with Hong Kong as another possibility.

The New York Stock Exchange has been regarded as the leader in this contest, partly for political reasons — Saudi Arabia has a close relationship with Trump’s US — but also because it is the biggest and most liquid market in the world, and most other oil giants, Aramco’s peer group, are listed there.

What was surprising in the conversations with bankers — even those at the big Wall Street banks — at Davos was that many seemed to prefer London. New York was seen as just too difficult because of regulation (the Sarbanes-Oxley rules that apply to corporate disclosures, for example) and litigation (climate change lawsuits and potential action under US terrorism funding laws).

Hong Kong will become a player in this contest if another option is pursued: The possible plan to sell a stake in Aramco outside a global market, with Chinese and Russian investors (possibly acting jointly) as the most likely buyers.

The final complicating factor in the whole affair is that of timing. If the IPO is to happen this year, as has been promised, there is a cut-off point at which all these issues have to be resolved and decisions taken. That point must surely be approaching fast. The time for debate is almost over.

*Frank Kane is an award-winning business journalist based in Dubai. He can be reached on Twitter @frankkanedubai

By Ty Joplin

“I feel anger and inner sadness… I feel my life has changed,” said a journalist who prefers not to be named, after being brutally beaten by Sudan’s secret police force.

He is not alone. At least 15 journalists were detained while covering the recent protests against rising bread prices in Sudan, along with dozens of demonstrators. The Sudanese government is using torture and violence as methods of coercing opposition and media coverage into silence, and as more protests are underway today in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, even more violence is expected.

But many of these stories will not be heard by the world.

Major media outlets, who once treated the government-led human rights violations in Sudan and the genocide in Darfur as a cause celebre, have either stopped covering the events entirely, or release only brief and underreported stories on the subject.

It’s not just repression against dissidents; Sudan is still committing genocide in Darfur with less resistance than ever before. Such acts have become normalized, treated as immutable facts of life in Sudan.

The lack of international pressure and coverage is failing the Sudanese people, who continue to be brutalized by an authoritarian regime, and who are at risk of being forgotten completely by those who used to champion their humanity and plight on the world stage.

Sudan’s Tumbling Economy

Throughout January, thousands of Sudanese took to the streets of Khartoum and other cities, demonstrating against the government’s raising of bread prices.

Immediately, the government cracked down violently, arresting protesters en masse, firing into crowds and killing indiscriminately, arresting journalists covering the events, and confiscating opposition newspapers.

The government’s removal of subsidies for bread follows recommendations by the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—an international organization critiqued for its policy recommendations to developing countries that often favor austerity and privatization to goods, which is then framed as “tighter monetary policy.”

After Sudan’s government implemented the IMF’s policy advice in January, bread prices reportedly doubled, causing outrage throughout the country and sparking protests centered in Khartoum.

Beyond that, little information has leaked out from the jails in Sudan housing activists and journalists, and even less from Sudanese papers to the rest of the world.

Silently Torturing Journalists

Opposition groups in Sudan organized protests today, called the “Great Salvation Rally,” but some key figures will be absent from the demonstrations, still in detention from the demonstrations that happened on Jan. 16.

Famed Sudanese journalist Amal Habbani, was detained on Jan. 16 while covering the protests.

According to Adil Colour, a freelance journalist in Sudan and friend of Habbani’s family, Habbani has been subject to torture. When family were allowed to visit her for 15 minutes, they saw she had visible injuries from beatings she sustained while in custody.

In addition to being beaten, Habbani has suffered from electric shocks according to sources close to her.

Habbani has consistently spoken out against the abuses of the Sudanese regime, and has been arrested several times. “Freedom of expression and journalism in Sudan collapsed to square one in the early 90s—the security service is slaughtering freedom of expression into non-existence,” said Habbani in an interview with the Doha Center for Media Freedom in 2013.

Habbani’s husband and fellow journalist, Shawgi Abdel Azim, was also detained.

“They sat me back on the floor and asked me for personal information, and asked me to draw a map showing them the place of my house and they asked why I was in the place of the protests. And thereafter, they charged me with inciting citizens to protest against the high prices,” Abdel Azim said in an interview.

Abel Azim confirms he was held for six days in Sudan’s notorious Cooper prison, which is known to hold political opponents of the regime.

Though Abdel Azim has been released, Habbani is still in custody.

Kamal Karrar, a journalist for the Sudanese Communist Party’s Al Midan newspaper, was also detained. According to sources close to him, Karrar has suffered from back injuries while in custody.

Karrar, like Habbani, is still being held by the the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS)—Sudan’s secret intelligence service that routinely tortures journalists and activists.

Ahmad’s Arrest and Beating

One journalist who will be referred to as Ahmad to protect his identity, was detained and released on the same day, but suffered horrific treatment from the NISS during his detention.

Ahmad was arrested with several other journalists while filming the demonstrations on the streets, and had his equipment confiscated.

While in custody, Ahmad told his captors, the NISS, that he is a journalist and he was just doing his job. He asked for his phone back, and was told to “keep silent and sit down against the wall.”

Ahmad says he felt “insulted”—that he was “treated like [a] criminal.” So he let his opinion be heard, telling the NISS that they were treating journalists poorly.

“One of them [got] angry” Ahmad says, and found a black hose, which he then used to beat Ahmad with angrily.

“The funny thing [is] is that most of my friend[s] knew that I would be beaten.” In Sudan, beating journalists and activists has become so common that it is now expected, especially by those who have been invovled in media and opposition politics. Ahmad’s friends have come to expect being physically assaulted by NISS forces.

“It seems normal. But I was shocked.”

“I feel anger and inner sadness… I feel my life has changed,” Ahmad concludes.

After his beating and eventual release, Ahmad says that he just isn’t in the mood to follow the news or cover events unfolding in the country, but Ahmad did meet with another journalist and confirms he too was electrocuted just as Habbani was.

The NISS, in using electrocution and electrified sticks, relies on a method of torture that subjects victims to convulsions and burns. If the voltage is high enough and the shocks applied long enough, the victim will begin to burn from the inside out.

Stories like Ahmad’s is becoming increasingly common in Sudan, but international news outlets are covering them less and less.

The horror of torture has become normalized to both the politics of Sudan and the subsequent coverage of it. Reports of mass arrests and torture, when they do leak out of the country despite a tight grip on press freedom, barely manage more than a few paragraphs of nominal descriptions, missing key details.

Stories that cover detainment and torture are underreported to be just “detainment.” Other stories covering protesters killed by police forces will mention investigations the government promises to undertake, but rarely mention that government forces fired live ammunition into crowds.

This framing paints subsequent deaths more as accidents that couldn’t have been avoided rather than deliberate targetting of civilians. The information presented is not only incomplete; it erases the tactics the government employs to silence, maim and even kill opposition.

A Genocide Uninterrupted

Sudan’s current regime is one of the most repressive and violent in the world.

Sudan’s sectarian, Islamist government is led by President Omar al-Bashir, who became the world’s first sitting president to be wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity in 2009.

Al-Bashir helped to forge a partnership with Janjaweed, an Arab militia, and began a brutal campaign of genocide against civilians in Darfur—a region in western Sudan. His campaign began in 2003 and has killed over 400,000 people, though exact numbers are difficult to verify.

From 2006 to 2007, press coverage of the genocide in Darfur spiked. Don Cheadle, George Clooney, Mia Farrow and Angelina Jolie all spearheaded campaigns to end the genocide and it became trendy to join chants for peace. For awhile, it seemed like the world would not stop pressuring Sudan until the government ended its genocide and began respecting human rights.

It didn’t work

Press coverage of the genocide all but stopped as did the chants, the mass protests around the world, and the celebrity condemnations.

Al-Bashir’s government, in addition to torturing dissidents, is still committing the genocide. In fact, it is facing less pressure than ever to stop relying on violence and finally begin respecting human rights.

The West and Sudan: From Antagonism to Partnership

In Oct., 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump ended two decades of embargo on Sudan and lifted sanctions from the country. The move was reportedely in an effort to foster more international partnerships with countries to build a bloc opposed to states like North Korea.

The U.S. and other countries around the world are now beginning to see the Sudanese regime as a reliable partner in countering violent extremism, completing the final step in the process of normalizing Sudan’s genocide and systemic deprivation.

It is no longer an issue for Western governments that they are partnered with a regime currently engaged in killing hundreds of thousands of its own people.

Sudan “has sought support through an international charm campaign,” says Gillian Lusk, a journalist specializing on Sudan. “The ‘carrots’ it offers the West are ‘cooperation’ on counter-terrorism, supposedly supplying ‘intelligence’ on international Islamists (intel which it could not have unless it was involved) and, for Europe, more ‘cooperation’ on migration.”

It seems to be working. Sudan’s government is less isolated than it was when it began the genocide, and looks to continue growing its relationship with Western governments. This is all “despite the fact that Sudanese security officers are involved in people-trafficking and most people fleeing from or via Sudan are likely to be genuine refugees, fleeing persecution in Sudan or Eritrea, or war and jihadists in Somalia,” according to Lusk.

In other words, Al-Bashir’s regime is part and parcel of the same type of violence that it is claiming to end.

Why Sudan has been Forgotten

So why isn’t this getting the type of coverage it got a decade ago? Where are the international outcries that were voiced so strongly when the same type of violence continues today?

There are many reasons that contribute to this communal ‘forgetting’ of Sudan and its brutal government. Although some have to do with the government’s control of the press, most other reasons ultimately boil down to one issue: covering Sudan has simply become inconvenient.

The government regularly confiscates opposition papers, preventing their distribution, and actively tries to create an environment hostile to journalism. In this sense, the government has enjoyed great success: very few international media outlets send reporters into Sudan, meaning most coverage of it comes from outside the country.

And when journalists are covering developments in the country, there is often a language barrier preventing them from talking with people on the ground. Stories that could have included first-hand accounts of events become little more than a few paragraphs detailing broad developments and public events.

The ongoing genocide and repression if mentioned, receive only a cursory glance.

However, none of this stopped the incessant coverage of the Darfur genocide in 2006 and 2007. It was difficult to find an outlet not seeking new angles on the issue or finding new stories to tell which describe, in graphic detail, the terror of genocide. So these are not the obstacles driving the lack of coverage.

What lies beyond these difficulties in covering Darfur lies a more troubling reason that it isn’t getting the attention it once commanded.

Sudan’s violence against activists and journalists, and genocide in Darfur, has become so normalized that it’s no longer newsworthy.

It has become ‘politics as usual.’

Sudan’s ‘Great Salvation’

“I think the real answer is that the lives of Sudanese simply aren’t as newsworthy as others in the world. This is especially true of Darfuris, and most especially non-Arab/African Darfuris, once a human rights cause celebre, [is] now completely invisible,” says Eric Reeves, professor at Smith College and expert on Sudan.

“They happen to be: poor, black, Muslim, geographically remote, they sit over no valuable natural resources, and are geostrategically inconsequential. Their lives and suffering simply don’t matter to major international actors, including the Arab League, the African Union, the U.N., the U.S., and the EU.”

Their plight, in other words, does not move the world, since the world can afford to ignore it if they so choose. And because violence in Sudan has come to be expected as its status quo, its humanitarian situation is considered more a given reality than a crisis.

The states that could put pressure on the Sudanese regime are now employing it as a partner in larger geopolitical plays, and media outlets that once staked their humanitarian credentials on providing rigorous and unflinching analysis on the violence and repression in Sudan have moved their operations to other, more explosive stories.

Outlets are focused on “terrorism, migration, what is happening in Syria and Iraq,” and other global events, says Adil Colour from Sudan. A slow burning conflict like the genocide and repression in Darfur attracts less attention than faster and more explosive stories like nuclear crises or massive battles that kill large numbers of people in a short period of time.

De Facto Impunity for Al-Bashir, the Ruler Behind the Genocide

By selling himself as an international partner and waiting for the heat to die down from the press, al-Bashir is emerging virtually unscathed.

As pressure eases and its coffers enjoy the lifting of sanctions, al-Bashir’s regime will be able to continue its brutal regime of repression and violence. Meanwhile, local activists and journalists are losing international allies and sway.

More violence is expected from the government today, and more people will inevitably be detained and tortured. Their voices threaten to be silenced completely, their repression seen as unnotable, if the normalization of the government’s state-sponsored terrorism continues.

This will not stop thousands of Sudanese dissidents from taking to the streets of Khartoum and demanding their rights, since they do not have the luxury of walking away from their own repression. In fact, their lives, endangered as they may be, depend on them voicing their grievances.

Whether they will be heard is up to the same group who first lent the Sudanese their ears and hands only to grow weary, lose conviction and eventually tune out.

As the ‘Great Salvation Rally’ blocks streets with crowds and police in Khartoum, the question rings louder than ever: who will hear Sudan to help deliver its Great Salvation?

Original source

By Dr. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen*

Amid the fire and fury of Michael Wolff’s explosive account of the Trump presidency so far, readers hoping for greater insight into some of the international controversies of his first year in office were left wanting more than the few pages on the president’s May 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Wolff suggests that the ‘Trump Doctrine’ boiled down to a transactional ‘If you give us what we want, we’ll give you what you want’, and that Saudi Arabia had become a test case to put it into action. Yet beyond a few platitudes about the ties between Jared Kushner and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Wolff did not dwell on the runup to and aftermath of the Riyadh Summit that Trump attended in May 2017. This is an omission, because the outreach by officials from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the then-incoming administration provides a cautionary tale about the conduct of foreign policy in the Age of Trump.

Coiling the Spring

Relations between the Obama administration and its counterparts in the Gulf soured considerably after the Arab Spring upheaval. Officials in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) capitals—particularly Riyadh and Abu Dhabi—reacted negatively to the withdrawal of U.S. support in February 2011 for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak—like them, a longstanding American political and security partner – and to the U.S. recognition of the Islamist governments that subsequently came to power in Tunisia and Egypt. President Obama’s decision in September 2013 to override his own ‘red line’ and not intervene after the Assad regime used chemical weapons dismayed policymakers in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who had been backing different rebel groups in the Syrian civil war. Prominent Saudi officials barely disguised their anger at being sidelined from the U.S.-led nuclear negotiations with Iran that culminated in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in July 2015. In March 2016, a remark about ‘free riders’ in an extensive profile of the ‘Obama Doctrine’ in The Atlantic provoked additional fury among ruling elites in GCC who felt it was aimed partly at them.

As ties with the Obama White House deteriorated, ruling circles in Gulf capitals became increasingly muscular in pursuing their own regional interests. This was, in part, a reaction by Saudi and Emirati officials to Qatar’s assertive approach to the uprisings in North Africa and Syria between 2011 and 2013. Led by Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, Qatar supported the political transitions in Tunisia and Egypt and the anti-regime uprisings in Libya and Syria, and felt comfortable with the regional empowerment of political Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood. In contrast, the UAE followed a diametrically opposed approach that sought to eliminate the potential for any Islamist-led opposition at first domestically and later regionally. Although both the UAE and Qatar participated in the NATO-led intervention in Libya that ousted Colonel Gaddafi in 2011, their supply of materiel to different militia groups helped sow the seeds for the conflict that later tore the country apart.

Emir Hamad stepped down on June 25, 2013, and handed power to his son, 33-year old Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. Eight days later, on July 3, 2013, Mohammed Morsi was toppled by a military-led coup in Egypt and replaced by General Abdel Fatteh El-Sisi, who succeeded him as President in 2014. Saudi Arabia and the UAE (and Kuwait) immediately pledged more than USD 12 billion to the new Egyptian regime, an amount that far outstripped the USD 7.5 billion in financial aid and development assistance that Qatar had provided to Morsi’s government in 2012-2013. Saudi and Emirati pressure on the new Qatari emir also began within weeks of Sheikh Tamim taking power, according to Qatar’s then-Foreign Minister (and current Minister of State for Defense) Khalid bin Mohammed al-Attiyah. Having been presented with an unexpected opportunity to reverse the openings of the Arab Spring, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh acted rapidly to ensure that neither the protest movements nor Qatar could ever again threaten the political status quo.

The second phase of the Gulf States’ regional assertiveness (after Qatar’s activist approach in 2011 and 2012) played out in Libya, Yemen, the Gulf, and Egypt. Saudi Arabia and the UAE funneled tens of billions of dollars in financial aid and investment in infrastructure designed to kickstart the ailing Egyptian economy. The UAE coordinated closely with Egypt and Russia to triangulate support for the Libyan strongman, Khalifa Haftar, as he battled Islamist militias in Eastern Libya, and carved out a largely autonomous sphere of influence separate from the internationally backed political process in Tripoli. The Saudis and Emiratis, together with the Bahrainis, withdrew their ambassadors from Qatar in March 2014 and accused Doha of interfering in the domestic affairs of its regional neighbors.

The first iteration of the Gulf diplomatic crisis lasted for nine months until Qatar agreed to make several security-related concessions, whereby the three ambassadors returned to Doha in December 2014. The Riyadh Agreement, signed by the six GCC foreign ministers on November 16, 2014, ostensibly settled the Qatar dispute. Seven senior members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, including its acting leader Mahmoud Hussein, were relocated to Turkey, and several Emirati Islamists who had taken up residence in Qatar after fleeing the security crackdown in the UAE were also expelled. Ten months later, the deployment of Qatari troops to join the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen appeared to seal Qatar’s return to the GCC fold, and to signify an end to the pre-2014 rupture.

On the international stage, King Salman of Saudi Arabia made clear his displeasure with the Obama administration by cancelling his planned attendance of the U.S.-GCC Summit at Camp David in May 2015. Six weeks earlier, Saudi Arabia and the UAE had launched Operation Decisive Storm in Yemen. The Yemen war was designed to restore the government of President Abd Rabbu Mansur Hadi, ousted in 2014 by the tactical alliance of Iran-allied Houthi rebels and former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s armed loyalists. Launched just five days before the initial deadline (later extended to July 2015) in the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the P5+1, the decision to take military action to counter and roll back perceived Iranian influence in Yemen represented a Saudi-led rebuke to the Obama administration’s belief that it was possible to separate the nuclear issue from Iran’s meddling in regional affairs.

Outreach to Trump

It was into this maelstrom of regional affairs and rivalries that the Trump administration launched itself after its unexpected triumph in the November 2016 presidential election. Officials from the UAE reached out almost immediately after the transition process had begun to share and project their points of view. The hawkish Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, held a three-hour meeting with Kushner, Steve Bannon, and Michael Flynn at Trump Tower in December 2016 – a visit that caused controversy because the UAE did not notify the Obama administration of the Crown Prince’s presence in New York, as is customary when a de facto head of state travels to the United States. Another UAE-based visitor during the transition was Erik Prince, brother of Betsy DeVos, President-elect Trump’s nominee as Secretary of Education. Prince had been hired by Abu Dhabi to develop a private security force after the demise of Blackwater in 2009. He ‘presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump to high-ranking Emiratis’ and met with a Russian official in a UAE-brokered meeting in the Seychelles shortly before the inauguration, reportedly as part of an effort to establish a back-channel of communication over Syria and Iran.

Once in office, Abu Dhabi’s influential ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, began to meet and talk regularly—up to once a week—with Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, tasked with much of the Trump administration’s Middle East policymaking. Kushner and Otaiba had been introduced in June 2016 by the real estate developer and longtime Trump confidante Thomas Barrack, Jr. Shortly after Trump took office, Politico reported that Kushner and Otaiba were ‘in almost constant phone and email contact’ and quoted Otaiba as stating that “he did all the asking, and I did all the talking.” In the early weeks of the administration, Kushner also reached out to Saudi policymakers, including Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (MbS)—like Kushner an ambitious millennial who had entered policymaking from a business background. They shared uncannily similar nicknames: ‘Mr. Everything’ (MbS) and the ‘Secretary of Everything’ (Kushner). The two men grew close, and reportedly stayed up until nearly 4 am ‘swapping stories and planning strategy’ during an unannounced visit Kushner made to Saudi Arabia in October 2017.

A president and his senior staff determined to do things their way and bypass the traditional playbook of U.S. foreign policy and international diplomacy offered a potentially rich opening for Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as did the political inexperience of many of the new appointees in the White House. There are indications that UAE officials did in fact, try to put pressure on Qatar during the final year of the Obama administration, only to be rebuffed by the lack of White House support. Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting, told a Global Politico podcast in January 2018 that ‘the break with Qatar, we basically had to spend a lot of time trying to prevent that from happening.’ He noted that under the Trump administration ‘some of the things that have happened this year, interestingly, were things that we were trying to forestall’ while in office.

Rarely in recent U.S. history has an administration entered office with such an avowed disdain for the policies of its predecessor. The expectation in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi that the Trump presidency would adopt hawkish positions on regional issues such as Iran and Islamism, that aligned closely with their own, was reaffirmed by the appointments of James Mattis as Secretary of Defense and Mike Pompeo as Director of the CIA. Secretary Mattis had in fact worked as an informal and unpaid military advisor to the UAE in 2015, after retiring from active duty in the Marine Corps, and had dubbed the UAE ‘Little Sparta’ for its military expertise and professionalism. Just a week into the Trump presidency, the carrying out of a joint raid on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) targets in Yemen by U.S. and UAE special forces, which left one U.S. Navy Seal dead, provided an early example of such security and defense cooperation in action.

During the spring of 2017, both MbS and Mohammed bin Zayed (MbZ) of Abu Dhabi visited the White House, and President Trump announced that his first overseas visit would be to Saudi Arabia in May. This was another break from recent presidential tradition, as four of his five immediate predecessors, going back to Ronald Reagan, had made Canada their first point of call, with only George W. Bush in February 2001 opting for Mexico instead. Many of the preparations for the Arab Islamic American Summit in Riyadh that the president attended in Riyadh on May 21-22 were made by the White House directly with the Royal Court in Saudi Arabia, and not by the State Department. MbZ visited Trump at the White House just six days before the Riyadh Summit to talk through preparations for the meeting. In Riyadh, President Trump met bilaterally with leaders from five of the six GCC states, cancelling on short notice a meeting with Oman’s deputy prime minister Sayyid Fahd bin Mahmoud Al Said. During the summit, Trump was pictured grasping a glowing orb with Saudi King Salman and Egyptian President Sisi.

During his meeting with Emir Tamim of Qatar, President Trump discussed Qatar’s “purchase of lots of beautiful military equipment because nobody makes it like the United States. And for us that means jobs, and it also means frankly great security back here, which we want.” The president’s comments made his subsequent swing against Qatar, after the Saudi and Emirati-led diplomatic and economic blockade began on June 5, 2017, the more surprising to observers of the presidency’s transactional approach to diplomacy. In several tweets posted on June 6, President Trump claimed, “During my recent trip to the Middle East, I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar – look!” He added, “So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar.” President Trump’s tweets suggested that he drew a direct line between discussions—yet to be made public—in Riyadh on May 21-22 and the Qatar embargo, which began with a hack of the Qatar News Agency, believed by U.S. intelligence officials to have been orchestrated by the UAE on May 23, just a day after the end of the Summit.

So, too, did comments made in October 2017 by Bannon, two months after he left his position as White House Chief Strategist. Speaking at an event critical of Qatar at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, Bannon stated, “I don’t think it was just by happenstance that two weeks after the summit we saw the blockade by the UAE and Bahrain and Egypt and the King of Saudi Arabia on Qatar.” He continued, “I think the single most important thing that’s happening in the world is the situation in Qatar. What’s happening in Qatar is every bit as important as what’s happening in North Korea.” Bannon spoke at the Hudson Institute on the same day that the McClatchy news agency reported that SCL Social Limited, a part of the same SCL Group as Cambridge Analytica (the data mining firm where Bannon served as Vice President before joining the White House) had disclosed a USD 330,000 contract with the UAE National Media Council. The contract included “a wide range of services specific to a global media campaign”, including USD 75,000 for a social media campaign targeting Qatar during the UN General Assembly. McClatchy observed, too, that Bannon had visited Abu Dhabi to meet with MbZ in September 2017, and that Breitbart (the media platform associated with Bannon both before and after his brief White House stint) had published more than 80 mostly negative stories about Qatar since the GCC crisis erupted.

Fair-weather friendship

The outreach and lobbying efforts made by Saudi and Emirati officials were not outliers, as policymakers across the political and business spectrum grappled to make sense of the chaotic first year of the Trump administration. Saudi Arabia added at least six new lobbying firms to its Washington, DC, roster between November 2016 and May 2017, but its 28 registered lobbying contracts fell far short of the 47 maintained by Japan. Within the U.S., tech giants Apple, Facebook, and Google spent record sums on federal lobbying during 2017 as executives sought to counter political demands for greater regulation of their activity and shape the administration’s thinking on immigration and other contentious issues. The lack of predictability in decision-making and the unorthodox background of some of the key principals in the White House contributed to a seemingly free-for-all scramble to gain the ear of the President and his inner circle, at least in the early months until the appointment of John Kelly as Chief of Staff in August 2017.

And yet, a striking element about the Saudi-Emirati outreach is the limited success it achieved. Officials may have seized the opportunity to shape the administration’s thinking and succeeded temporarily, during June 2017, in getting the president to support the initial action against Qatar, but that proved a high watermark in cooperation that did not lead to any substantive follow-through. Herein lies the cautionary tale that other world leaders—from Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull to Britain’s Theresa May and Germany’s Angela Merkel—also have discovered. The transactional approach to policymaking taken by the Trump presidency is not necessarily underpinned by any deeper or underlying commitment to a relationship of values or even interests. An example of this came in July 2017 when President Trump told Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network that he had made his presence at the Riyadh Summit conditional on USD 110 billion in arms sales and other agreements signed with Saudi Arabia. “I said, you have to do that, otherwise I’m not going,” bragged the president.

A White House readout of a telephone call between President Trump and Qatar’s Emir Tamim on January 15, 2018, further illustrated the lack of fixity in the president’s position on key issues. Whereas Trump had endorsed the Saudi-Emirati blockade of Qatar in June 2017, and even sought on Twitter to take credit for the move, seven months later he thanked the Emir for “Qatari action to counter terrorism and extremism in all its forms.” The timing of the call between President Trump and Emir Tamim was as notable as its content, as it came after several days of Emirati and Qatar accusations of aerial interceptions that significantly raised the tension in the months-long standoff. The call signaled not only the 180-degree flip since June 2017 in the president’s position on the Gulf crisis, but it also made clear that the president no longer shared the view of Qatar’s detractors that Doha represented a threat to regional security and stability.

Trump’s reversal may, in part, reflect an acknowledgment that Qatar’s leadership had signed memoranda of understanding with Washington on combating terrorism and its financing (July 2017) and on strengthening cooperation between the Public Prosecution in Qatar and the U.S. Department of Justice (January 2018). Officials from both countries also convened a technical exchange workshop in Doha on October 4, 2017, to develop a Domestic Designation system in Qatar and organized an inaugural U.S.-Qatar Counterterrorism Dialogue in Washington, DC, on November 8, 2017. These measures constituted practical steps to deepen the bilateral strategic and security partnership in ways that likely were noted by U.S. delegations to Doha, led by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, in October 2017.

Although the crisis in the Gulf may have passed its most dangerous moment—when for a few days in June 2017 the possibility of Saudi and Emirati military action against Qatar was deemed so serious by U.S. officials that Secretary of State Tillerson reportedly had to warn MbS and MbZ against any precipitous action—but it has had significant negative consequences for both the region and Washington. Within the region, four decades of diplomatic and technocratic cooperation among the GCC six states has been put at risk, threatening the survival of one of the hitherto most durable regional organizations in the Arab world. While the GCC managed to convene its annual summit in December 2017—against the expectations of many and largely out of respect to Kuwait’s Emir Sabah al-Ahmad Al Sabah, a widely respected elder statesman and the host of the meeting—it was marred by the non-attendance of the Saudi, Emirati, and Bahraini leadership, blindsided by the simultaneous announcement of a Saudi-Emirati cooperative partnership that pointedly excluded other GCC states, and adjourned amid acrimony on the first morning of the planned two-day event. It is hard to see how the GCC can recover after the sub-regional institution has failed to prevent three of its members from turning on a fourth twice in three years, and when it has been absent at every stage of the crisis, from the initial list of grievances to the subsequent attempts at mediation.

For the U.S., the Gulf row—at least in its early stages—damaged the credibility and the unity of American policymaking in the region, not least because it created the perception of a rift between the White House, on the one side, and the Departments of State and Defense, on the other. The notion that the U.S. lacked a unified approach toward the unfolding crisis was magnified by the contrast between Secretary Tillerson’s measured comments as he counseled a mediated solution to the standoff and the bellicose language of President Trump. On June 9, 2017—the same day that Secretary Tillerson called on the so-called Anti-Terror Quartet to moderate their position on Qatar—he was undercut visibly and in public as President Trump stated, “The nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level.” Associates of Tillerson let it be known that the Secretary of State was “blindsided by the Trump statement” and “absolutely enraged that the White House and State Department weren’t on the same page.” For his part, Secretary Mattis was reported to have reacted with shock and disbelief to the Saudi and Emirati embargo of Qatar. He thought that “the Saudis had picked an unnecessary fight, and just when the administration thought they’d gotten everyone in the Gulf on the same page in forming a common front against Iran.”

Washington’s policy approaches toward Qatar appear now to have settled on the view that the standoff is detrimental to American strategic interests both in the Gulf and across the broader Middle East, and should be resolved by Kuwaiti-led mediation. However, the confused signals that came out of the Trump administration during its first six months in office do constitute a cautionary tale as they illustrate the vulnerability of a new and inexperienced political class to influence that came close to jeopardizing a key U.S. partnership in the Middle East. Unlike, say, the U.S. and Iran, there are no clearly-defined ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sides the U.S. should support or oppose in its dealings with the GCC members, all of whom have been pivotal, in different ways, to the projection of U.S. power and influence in the region. Looking back at the Gulf crisis, officials may reflect on the attempt to push the U.S. government toward supporting a policy in favor of Saudi and Emirati (but not American) interests; for their part, policymakers in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, and also Doha, are doubtless all too aware that they can no longer take unconditional U.S. support for granted and that the transactional nature of the Trump presidency means it will evaluate policy on a case-by-case basis that could chop and change without warning.

About the author:
*Dr. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen (@Dr_Ulrichsen) is an Advisor at Gulf State Analytics (@GulfStateAnalyt) and a Research Fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. His work spans the disciplines of political science, international relations, and international political economy.

Source:
Gulf State Analytics originally published this article on January 31, 2018