(RFE/RL) — Turkey has taken control of 12 schools in Afghanistan run by an organization linked to U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara blames for a failed coup in 2016.

The Afghan-Turk schools will now be run by Turkey’s state educational foundation Maarif, defying opposition by Afghan students and parents.

The move against Afghan Turk CAG Educational NGO (ATCE), the body that runs the schools, appears to be part of Turkey’s campaign against followers of Gulen, whom Ankara accuses of being behind a coup attempt in July 2016 aimed at ousting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

ATCE, which says it is an independent organization, has operated schools in several cities including the capital, Kabul, Mazar-e Sharif, Kandahar, and Herat since 1995.

Turkish Education Minister Ismet Yilmaz and his Afghan counterpart, Mohammad Ibrahim Shinwari, attended a handover ceremony in Kabul on February 26.

In return for control of the schools, Turkey has promised to double the number of Turkish schools in Afghanistan, bring in new, highly qualified teachers, cut student fees, and offer more scholarships to Afghan students, according to the Afghan Education Ministry.

By Michael Lelyveld

China has announced plans to meet targets for downsizing its steel industry two years ahead of schedule in an apparent signal that there will be no more cuts in production capacity after 2018.

On Feb. 7, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in a statement that China will reach targets for trimming surplus steel capacity this year instead of in 2020, Reuters reported.

In January 2016, Premier Li Keqiang first pledged to reduce overcapacity in the bloated steel sector by 100 million to 150 million metric tons without specifying a date.

In official statements and state media since then, the government’s goal has been reported as 150 million tons by 2020.

According to MIIT statements, China has already closed at least 115 million tons of outmoded and excess capacity.

In 2016, the industry reportedly exceeded its goal of 45 million tons for the year, shutting down 65 million tons of capacity. Last year, it reached the annual target of 50 million tons by the end of August, the ministry said.

The size and pace of the cuts has been closely watched because China produces nearly half the world’s crude steel with the capacity to make far more.

China’s overcapacity has been a source of international tension for well over a decade, sparking complaints from foreign steelmakers over low prices, hidden subsidies and unfair export competition.

Last April, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered an investigation into whether steel imports from China and other countries pose a national security risk.

Trump is scheduled to decide on possible trade measures for steel imports by April 11, 90 days after a Commerce Department report was submitted under the rarely-used Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. A similar decision is pending for aluminum on April 19.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has recommended a choice from among three options on steel. These include a 24-percent tariff on imports from all countries, a 53-percent tariff on steel from China and 11 other countries, combined with quota restrictions on other exporters, or quotas on imports from all countries.

On Feb. 17, China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOC) called the U.S. finding of a national security threat “groundless” and warned of retaliation.

“If the United States’ final decision affects China’s interests, we will take necessary measures to defend our rights,” said Wang Hejun, head of the MOC trade remedy and investigation bureau, as quoted by the official Xinhua news agency.

Restricting steel production

But China also has reasons of its own for tightening up on steel, which has been a major source of coal consumption and smog.

Last March, central government and municipal authorities unveiled plans to restrict steel production in northern areas surrounding Beijing during the winter heating season starting Nov. 15, reducing output by half at most mills.

The limits appear to have helped Beijing to avoid a repeat of last winter’s smog crisis, but the controls will be lifted on March 15, opening the door to a surge in production again.

On Monday, Reuters reported that Tangshan city in Hebei province is considering a draft plan to extend the restrictions for some capacity until November to help reduce smog.

It is unclear whether the extension will take place or whether other steelmakers would boost production in response.

But even with the winter cutbacks, China’s crude steel production rose 5.7 percent last year to a record 831.7 million tons, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

China’s capacity cutting has only a tangential effect on production, primarily because its overcapacity has been so huge.

For years, state media reports have highlighted China’s capacity cuts without quantifying the total size of the industry’s production capacity.

But in April 2016, a senior MIIT official said China’s capacity stood at 1.13 billion tons, Reuters reported at the time. The total leaves 326 million tons as surplus, based on NBS production figures for 2015.

As a result, China’s targeted cuts of 150 million tons would eliminate only 46 percent of its excess, allowing steelmakers to set records for output despite the capacity reductions.

The extent of the downsizing makes it critical to know whether China’s announcement on achieving the target means it has no plans to do more.

So far, China is celebrating the results of its policies, since the cuts have had a psychological effect on the market, returning the industry to profitability.

“Steel prices soared on expectations that supply would tighten due to capacity cuts,” the official English-language China Daily reported, citing a jump of more than 50 percent for benchmark rebar last year.

But the policies have done little to address foreign complaints about China’s production volumes and market dominance.

Last year, China’s global market share for crude steel rose to 49.2 percent from 49 percent in 2016, the World Steel Association said.

Since 2016, the capacity cuts have actually encouraged more production as some steelmakers reopened closed lines to take advantage of higher prices.

In recent weeks, MIIT has issued tough statements on keeping capacity in check without ruling out possible production increases.

On Jan. 8, the ministry said it would require steelmakers to eliminate 1.25 tons of old capacity for every new ton of modern capacity they add this year.

“We will strictly forbid any new steel capacity to be launched and make sure all outdated steel capacity is eliminated and prevented from reopening,” the ministry pledged in an earlier statement.

But the country’s biggest producer, state-owned China Baowu Steel Group, has already announced plans to expand in the longer term as smaller private competitors are pressured to shut down, the South China Morning Post reported in September.

Baowu Steel has targeted an increase in capacity from 60 million tons to 100 million tons, the company’s general manager said.

Impact of the cuts

Derek Scissors, an Asia economist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, said the impact of China’s cuts depends on what it plans to do next.

“The Chinese steel sector was 35 percent to 40 percent oversized,” Scissors said. “Now it may be only half that. The bloat was so bad that capacity cuts have had no visible effect on production, but they still needed to be made.”

“If Beijing now declares victory and the industry goes back to business as usual, the whole program was a farce,” he said.

“If they make no further capacity cuts but prevent re-expansion, the true target was only consolidation of larger state-owned enterprises, as the central government has long wanted,” said Scissors.

“But there’s at least more of a chance to actually shrink steel now than there was in 2014,” he concluded.

While much may depend on the psychological effects of the numbers, there are several reasons to doubt the numbers themselves.

Last year, a study sponsored by Greenpeace East Asia found that 54 million tons of operations that were claimed as capacity cuts in 2016 had restarted due to price increases.

It is unclear whether the government has continued to count such temporary closures in its totals of shutdowns.

Another analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics argued that 200 million tons of spare capacity was reasonable for China’s steel industry to respond to market fluctuations. But it also said that officials had mixed iron and steel together in their reports, making it unclear whether the goals for crude steel have been met.

China has also claimed gains in ending 140 million tons of illicit production of substandard steel made with induction furnaces using scrap metal. The products are not included in the steel capacity cut totals, although they affect prices and smog-producing emissions.

Whether the production has been permanently eliminated may be open to question.

A posting by S&P Global Platts news service last year raised doubts about whether the illicit production could be removed from the market.

“Induction furnaces have been a thorn in the eye of Chinese steel industrial policy since 2002, but have largely been successful in evading measures,” the report said.

“The more underground, home-brew operations play a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities. They simply dismantle facilities quickly before inspections, and assemble them again after,” it said, quoting “market participants.”

The fungus that causes athlete’s foot and other skin and toenail infections may have lost its ability to sexually reproduce as it adapted to grow on its human hosts.

Scientists analyzed samples of this tenacious organism, called Trichophyton rubrum, and found that nearly all belonged to a single mating type. What’s more, when they tried to set the fungi up with members of another mating type, they refused to do the deed, even after the scientists enlisted a variety of seduction schemes — lowering the lights, cloaking the Petri dishes in plastic, flipping them upside down.

If this fungus can’t sexually reproduce, it can’t diversify, and if it can’t diversify, that may mean its days on this planet are numbered, said Joseph Heitman, MD, PhD, senior study author and professor and chair of molecular genetics and microbiology at Duke University School of Medicine.

But don’t expect toenail fungus to appear on the endangered species list anytime soon. “It is commonly thought that if an organism becomes asexual, it is doomed to extinction,” Heitman said. “While that may be true, the time frame we are talking about here is probably hundreds of thousands to millions of years.”

Though that timeline won’t be much help to the nearly 2 billion people who currently suffer from fungal infections of the skin and nails, the discovery that this species may be asexual — and therefore nearly identical at the genetic level — does highlight potential vulnerabilities that researchers could exploit in designing more effective antifungal medications. The findings appear online in the journal Genetics.

Fungal infections affect approximately 25 percent of the world’s population, and Trichophyton rubrum is usually the species to blame. People can pick up this infection by walking barefoot around swimming pools, showers or locker rooms, or by sharing personal items such as towels or nail clippers. Though there are plenty of over-the-counter powders and ointments along with prescription anti-fungal drugs on the market, most keep the infection at bay but don’t clear it. The infection is notoriously difficult to cure, and recent evidence suggests it may often be drug-resistant.

In this study, an international team of researchers decided to take a close look at the genetic makeup and sexual predilections of this fungus. They collected 135 different Trichophyton rubrum samples from around the world and determined their mating type by searching the fungal genome for either the alpha or the HMG domain, which is essentially the molecular equivalent of looking between a dog’s legs. The researchers were amazed to find that all but one of the samples were from a single mating type.

Though the findings suggested the fungi had become asexual, the scientists wondered if they would mate if given the opportunity. They placed the isolates in petri dishes along with a variety of potentially compatible mating types, under a variety of different conditions, and then waited to see if any magic would happen. After five months, the researchers looked at the petri dishes under a light microscope, scanning for the growth of coiled appendages that might contain spores. They didn’t see any.

Curious, the researchers sequenced the genome of the organism. They found that the organism is very clonal, meaning that different isolates (populations) are nearly perfect clones of each other, with little variation from one genome to the next. Any two genomes of Trichophyton rubrum are 99.97 percent identical, which translates to three differences out of every 10,000 genetic letters. Other fungi such as Cryptococcus are only 99.36 percent identical, differing in 64 out of 10,000 letters, making them 21 times more diverse than the toenail fungus.

“Such incredibly high clonality across isolates from around the world is remarkable, and suggests that this organism is very well adapted to humans,” said Christina Cuomo, PhD, senior study author and a group leader for the Fungal Genomics Group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

But there is a silver lining. Because the fungus is so clonal and could also be asexual, its ability to adapt further may be more limited than some other fungi. Thus, any new strategies that researchers could develop against this species may have a higher chance of success than those targeting sexual species, which are more capable of mutating or amplifying drug-resistance genes.

Researchers from RMIT University in Melbourne Australia have developed a new ultra-thin coating that responds to heat and cold, opening the door to “smart windows”.

The self-modifying coating, which is a thousand times thinner than a human hair, works by automatically letting in more heat when it’s cold and blocking the sun’s rays when it’s hot.

Smart windows have the ability to naturally regulate temperatures inside a building, leading to major environmental benefits and significant financial savings.

Lead investigator Associate Professor Madhu Bhaskaran said the breakthrough will help meet future energy needs and create temperature-responsive buildings.

“We are making it possible to manufacture smart windows that block heat during summer and retain heat inside when the weather cools,” Bhaskaran said.

“We lose most of our energy in buildings through windows. This makes maintaining buildings at a certain temperature a very wasteful and unavoidable process.

“Our technology will potentially cut the rising costs of air-conditioning and heating, as well as dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of buildings of all sizes.

“Solutions to our energy crisis do not come only from using renewables; smarter technology that eliminates energy waste is absolutely vital.”

Smart glass windows are about 70 per cent more energy efficient during summer and 45 per cent more efficient in the winter compared to standard dual-pane glass.

New York’s Empire State Building reported energy savings of US$2.4 million and cut carbon emissions by 4,000 metric tonnes after installing smart glass windows. This was using a less effective form of technology.

“The Empire State Building used glass that still required some energy to operate,” Bhaskaran said. “Our coating doesn’t require energy and responds directly to changes in temperature.”

Co-researcher and PhD student Mohammad Taha said that while the coating reacts to temperature it can also be overridden with a simple switch.

“This switch is similar to a dimmer and can be used to control the level of transparency on the window and therefore the intensity of lighting in a room,” Taha said. “This means users have total freedom to operate the smart windows on-demand.”

Windows aren’t the only clear winners when it comes to the new coating. The technology can also be used to control non-harmful radiation that can penetrate plastics and fabrics. This could be applied to medical imaging and security scans.

Bhaskaran said that the team was looking to roll the technology out as soon as possible.

“The materials and technology are readily scalable to large area surfaces, with the underlying technology filed as a patent in Australia and the US,” she said.

The research has been carried out at RMIT University’s state-of-the-art Micro Nano Research Facility with colleagues at the University of Adelaide and supported by the Australian Research Council.

How the coating works

The self-regulating coating is created using a material called vanadium dioxide. The coating is 50-150 nanometres in thickness.

At 67 degrees Celsius, vanadium dioxide transforms from being an insulator into a metal, allowing the coating to turn into a versatile optoelectronic material controlled by and sensitive to light.

The coating stays transparent and clear to the human eye but goes opaque to infra-red solar radiation, which humans cannot see and is what causes sun-induced heating.

Until now, it has been impossible to use vanadium dioxide on surfaces of various sizes because the placement of the coating requires the creation of specialised layers, or platforms.

The RMIT researchers have developed a way to create and deposit the ultra-thin coating without the need for these special platforms – meaning it can be directly applied to surfaces like glass windows.

“The main issue is that there is only a handful of islands in the Southern Ocean and not all of them are suitable to sustain large breeding colonies,” said Robin Cristofari, first author of the study, from the Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien (IPHC/CNRS/University of Strasbourg) and the Centre Scientifique de Monaco (CSM).

King penguins are in fact picky animals: in order to form a colony where they can mate, lay eggs and rear chicks over a year, they need tolerable temperature all year round, no winter sea ice around the island, and smooth beach of sand or pebbles. But, above all, they need an abundant and reliable source of food close by to feed their chicks.

For millennia, this seabird has relied on the Antarctic Polar Front, an upwelling front in the Southern Ocean concentrating enormous amounts of fish on a relatively small area. Yet, due to climate change, this area is drifting south, away from the islands where most King penguins currently live. Parents are then forced to swim farther to find food, while their progeny is waiting, fasting longer and longer on the shore. This study predicts that, for most colonies, the length of the parents’ trips to get food will soon exceed the resistance to starvation of their offspring, leading to massive King penguin crashes in population size, or, hopefully, relocation.

Using the information hidden away in the penguin’s genome, the research team has reconstructed the changes in the worldwide King penguin population throughout the last 50,000 years, and discovered that past climatic changes, causing shifts in marine currents, sea-ice distribution and Antarctic Polar Front location, have always been linked to critical episodes for the King penguins.

However, hope is not lost yet: King penguins have already survived such crises several times (the last time was 20 thousand years ago), and they may be particularly good at it.

“Extremely low values in indices of genetic differentiation told us that all colonies are connected by a continuous exchange of individuals,” said Emiliano Trucchi formerly at the University of Vienna and now at the University of Ferrara, one of the coordinator of the study. “In other words, King penguins seem to be able to move around quite a lot to find the safest breeding locations when things turn grim”.

But there is a major difference this time: for the first time in the history of penguins, human activities are leading to rapid and/or irreversible changes in the Earth system, and remote areas are no exception. In addition to the strongest impact of climate change in Polar Regions, Southern Ocean is now subject to industrial fishing, and penguins may soon have a very hard time fighting for their food.

“There are still some islands further south where King penguins may retreat,” said Céline Le Bohec (IPHC/CNRS/University of Strasbourg and CSM), leader of the programme 137 of the French Polar Institut Paul-Emile Victor within which the study was initiated, “but the competition for breeding sites and for food will be harsh, especially with the other penguin species like the Chinstrap, Gentoo or Adélie penguins, even without the fisheries. It is difficult to predict the outcome, but there will surely be losses on the way. If we want to save anything, proactive and efficient conservation efforts but, above all, coordinated global action against global warming should start now.”

By Jhumur Deb and Akash Vashishtha

An Indian government official on Monday defended the army chief’s controversial assertion that Pakistan and China were engineering an influx of Bangladeshis into India’s northeast to destabilize the country.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Bipin Rawat caused a stir last week when he suggested that Pakistan, with support from China – India’s other main rival – were playing a “proxy game” to send Bangladeshi immigrants into its northeastern states. Some of these states share borders with Bangladesh.

“It is beyond our domain to comment on the army chief’s statement, but he obviously wouldn’t have said such a thing without substantial evidence,” an official with India’s Home Ministry told BenarNews on condition of anonymity.

In a speech at a seminar in New Delhi about securing India’s borders in the northeast, Gen. Rawat pointed to what he said were two factors driving immigration into that region from Bangladesh.

“One is they are running short of space. Large parts of [Bangladesh] get flooded during monsoons. And the other issue is a planned immigration that is taking place because of our neighbors,” Rawat said, according to a transcript of his Feb. 21 speech. “They will always try and ensure that this area is taken over, playing the proxy dimension of warfare.”

“You don’t have to confront a stronger nation through conventional operations. So you play a proxy game. This proxy game is very well played by our western neighbor, supported also by our northern neighbor,” Rawat said, referring to Pakistan and China but not by name.

The general did not explain how China and Pakistan – Bangladesh’s longtime enemy from which it broke free through a war of independence in 1971 – could engineer such a mass migration as part of a proxy war.

On Monday, a spokesman for the Indian army declined to answer questions from BenarNews seeking clarification.

“We cannot comment on his statement. But whatever he said, he said it absolutely clearly,” said the army official, who asked to be kept anonymous.

Gen. Rawat’s made the comments as India’s Hindu nationalist-led government was moving to deport an estimated 20 million Bangladeshi-origin Muslims who had migrated to India illegally since the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. The final draft of a National Register of Citizens (NRC), which aims to identify and deport them, is to be submitted to the Supreme Court before June 30.

For years, the northeastern Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura have struggled to contain armed groups demanding sovereignty from Hindu-majority India, which shares more than 2,000 miles of its border with Bangladesh and China.

“People have infiltrated from Bangladesh to reside in Assam, Tripura and Mizoram. Besides, such migrants exist in huge numbers in West Bengal [and] who came during the 1971 war,” the home ministry official said, adding that Bangladeshi immigrants had also settled in states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh.

‘Important aspect of national security’

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, headed by his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), won state elections in Assam in 2016 on a pledge of deporting Bangladeshi migrants from the state.

A BJP spokesman praised the army chief for commenting on an “important aspect of national security.”

“It is only natural that the socio-political, demographic, cultural aspects should be discussed. In fact, the army should be saluted for his talk,” party spokesman Sambit Patra told a television news channel.

But the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), a political party fighting for the Muslim minority in Assam, slammed Rawat’s comments, describing them as unbecoming of the nation’s top army official.

“If there is a possibility of Pakistan trying to push in illegal migrants, the defense ministry should take steps to stem this. We don’t understand why Rawat made such a comment,” AIUDF President Haider Hussain Bora told BenarNews. “It seems he wants to join politics. From his comments, it seems like he was trying to please people to win a political post.”

‘Zero proof’

Analysts, meanwhile, took differing views on the general’s speech.

“[Rawat’s] claim is not only based on sound intelligence, but also experienced through practice. Pakistan and Bangladesh might historically be antagonists, but Pakistan’s ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] and other groups are sponsoring Bangladeshi extremists groups and elements to circulate fake currency and wage terror activities in India,” Dushyant Nagar, a Delhi-based political and strategic affairs analyst, told BenarNews.

“China has, in fact, been aiding Pakistan in this proxy war. China’s only aim is to encourage the anti-India sentiment in the northeastern states so that it has an edge in case of a military confrontation,” he said.

Bharat Karnad, a foreign policy analyst at New Delhi’s Centre for Policy Research, agreed.

“[It is] no secret. They [Pakistan and China] are hand-in-glove in waging this proxy warfare against India and they have been doing this for the last 25 years. It is high time that an Indian official came out openly about it,” he told BenarNews.

However, another security analyst criticized Rawat for what he described as over-the-top allegations by the general.

“The army chief or anyone else has zero proof that Pakistan and China were masterminding the alleged influx … the entire Bangladesh border is fenced and patrolled, and if he has questions on its porosity, he would do well to take it up officially with the Border Security Force and Ministry of Home Affairs,” Bangladesh’s Daily Star newspaper quoted Manoj Joshi, a fellow at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation.

*Rohit Wadhwaney in New Delhi contributed to this report.

By Andrea Gagliarducci

As the fifth anniversary of his pontificate approaches, it is obvious that Pope Francis has made his mark on the life of the Church, and will continue to. In fact, in the upcoming months, there could be a new document from the Pope, and a new consistory to create new cardinals.

These possibilities have not been officially confirmed. However, the rumors in Vatican corridors are widespread, and a new document, along with new cardinals, seems imminent.

The possibility of a new papal document has began circulating in recent days. The document – reported to be an encyclical – would deal with Catholic spirituality in the modern world.

In particular, the Pope is expected to tackle the issue of worldliness, which he has often described as one of the main problems within the Church.

In Evangelii Gaudium, the Pope underscored that worldliness “can be fueled in two deeply interrelated ways.”

First is “the attraction of gnosticism,” namely, “a purely subjective faith whose only interest is a certain experience or a set of ideas and bits of information which are meant to console and enlighten, but which ultimately keep one imprisoned in his or her own thoughts and feelings.”

The second is “the self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism of those who ultimately trust only in their own powers and feel superior to others because they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style from the past.”

Pope Francis added to that “a supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads instead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying. In neither case is one really concerned about Jesus Christ or others.”

According to rumors, pelagianism will be a main focus of any forthcoming papal document.

Some hint of the alleged document can be found in Pope Francis’ speech to the Plenary Assembly of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, delivered Jan. 26, 2018.

On that occasion, the Pope praised the work of some members on “some aspects of the Christian salvation, in order to reaffirm the meaning of redemption with a reference to the current neo-pelagian and neo-gnostic trends.”

“These trends,” the Pope added, “are expressions of an individualism that trusts one’s own power in order to be saved.” The Pope stressed that Christians “believe instead that salvation is in the Communion with the Risen Christ, who, thanks to the gift of his spirit, introduced us to a new order of relations with the Father and men.”

If there is a document, it will be a further sign of the mark Pope Francis is making on the Church.

The Pope is also shaping the Church with consistories, as new cardinals tend to fit a profile preferred by Francis. With his four consistories, the Pope has profoundly changed the composition of the College of Cardinals, putting an emphasis especially on far-flung dioceses and bishops with pastoral experience.

Another consistory is also expected soon, likely in June or November. Cardinal Paolo Romeo, emeritus Archbishop of Palermo, turned 80 on Feb. 20, and will not be eligible to vote in a future conclave.

By June, 5 other cardinals will have turned 80, dropping the number of cardinal electors from 120 to 114. The cardinals who will turn 80 are Francesco Coccopalmerio, Keith O’Brien, Manuel Monteiro, Pierre Nguyen Van Nhon and Angelo Amato.

Because 120 is the maximum limit of cardinals voting in a conclave, the Pope could have six possible slots to create new cardinals in an upcoming consistory.

The Pope could also make the decision to create more cardinals, and modify the limit set for voting cardinals. At the moment, there are 49 voting cardinals created by Pope Francis, 52 created by Benedict XVI and 19 created by St. John Paul II.

With a new consistory, Pope Francis will likely become responsible for the largest bloc of cardinal-electors in a future papal conclave.

The Pope will have further slots for new cardinals in 2019, when Cardinals Stanislaw Dziwisz, John Tong Hon and Edoardo Menichelli will turn 80.

In the meantime, the Pope has begun a substantial shift within the ranks of the Secretariat of State, appointing José Avelino Bettencourt and Alfred Xuereb as nuncios on Feb. 26.

Msgr. José Avelino Bettencourt has been the head of Protocol at the Secretariat of State since November 2012. He is now appointed as a nuncio, but no post has been assigned to him. He could go as nuncio to Georgia, a post that would likely also include the nunciature to Armenia and Azerbaijan, as it did for Archbishop Marek Solczynski, who was nuncio to Georgia until 2017, before being appointed nuncio to Tanzania. But an official announcement has not yet come.

Msgr. Alfred Xuereb has been the general secretary to the Secretariat for the Economy since March 2014. He had previously been Benedict XVI’s second secretary, and he kept the post of second secretary to the Pope at the beginning of Pope Francis’ pontificate. He has also worked in the Vatican Secretariat of State and then in the Prefecture for the Pontifical Household.

It is also expected that Msgr. Antoine Camilleri, Vatican “vice minister for Foreign Affairs” since 2013, will be appointed a nuncio, allegedly to Singapore, a key post, considering that the nuncio to Singapore is also the Vatican’s non-resident representative to Vietnam. However, this appointment has not been made official yet.

This is an interesting move, as the deputy of the Vatican “minister for foreign affairs” is usually in a better position to be promoted than the head of protocol. The impression is that the Pope is planning for major changes in the Secretariat of State, but that no final decision has been made, and that possibly the rumors spread on the decisions have somehow disturbed the Pontiff.

However, it seems evident that Pope Francis is accelerating moves to shape the direction of the Church, giving more impetus to the process of reform he began when he was elected.

The recently-passed big-spending budget deal’s failure to generate significant opposition from the “tea party” has led some to pen obituaries for this once-powerful movement. These commentators may have a point. However, few of them understand the true causes of the tea party’s demise.

The movement commonly referred to as the tea party arose in opposition to the 2008 bank bailouts. The tea party grew as its focus shifted to opposition to President Obama’s policies, particularly his stimulus spending bill, cap-and-trade legislation, and, of course, the health care plan tea party leaders successfully branded as Obamacare. In its early days, the tea party was equally opposed to big spenders in both parties. In fact, it was often harder on Republicans than on Democrats. Tea party groups even backed primary challengers to Republican incumbents.

Unfortunately, the tea party was quickly coopted by the GOP. As a result, while tea party groups still opposed Republican policies, they began muting their opposition to all but the worst Republican politicians. Now that Republicans control the White House and Congress, tea party groups have even muted their opposition to the policies. This reinforces the tendency of Republicans to support spending bills backed by Donald Trump or George W. Bush that they would have fought tooth and nail if they were proposed by Barack Obama or Bill Clinton.

The tea party’s effectiveness as a force for fiscal conservatism was also crippled by the support of too many of its leaders and favorite politicians for a hyper-interventionist foreign policy. Support for foreign interventionism logically requires support for huge military budgets, which conflicts with a commitment to fiscal conservatism.

Some tea party-backed politicians tried to reconcile support for militarism and fiscal conservatism by claiming to be “cheap hawks.” The problem with this formulation is that the so-called cheap hawks accept the neoconservative premise that American exceptionalism justifies US military intervention around the globe. This makes it impossible for them to resist the calls for increased military spending to ensure the United States has the ability to police the world in the name of “democracy.”

Devotion to protecting the military-industrial complex from the budget ax leads defense hawks to cut deals with progressives to increase spending on both warfare and welfare. We saw this with the recent budget deal, where so-called fiscal conservatives defended a $65 billion increase in domestic spending because it was necessary to get progressive support for an $80 billion increase in military spending. One cannot be both a budget hawk and a defense hawk.

Fortunately, while the tea party is dead or at least on life support, a related movement is alive and growing. This is the liberty movement that grew out of my 2008 presidential campaign. Ironically, one of the first events of that movement was called a “tea party.”

Unlike the tea party, the liberty movement does not just focus on domestic policy. It works to roll back government in all areas. Thus, the liberty movement is just as committed to ending unnecessary and unconstitutional wars and protecting civil liberties as it is to repealing Obamacare. Liberty movement leaders and activists also refuse to compromise their principles for the benefit of the Republican Party. The commitment to consistency and principle may be why the liberty movement is so attractive to young people. This growing movement is a source of hope that the cause of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government will prevail.

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.

A research team has published a new study lead by Pat Roche, professor of astrophysics at The University of Oxford, and Chris Packham, associate professor of physics and astronomy at The University of Texas at San Antonio. It reveals a new high resolution map of the magnetic field lines in gas and dust swirling around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. The team created the map, which is the first of its kind, using the CanariCam infrared camera attached to the Gran Telescopio Canarias on the island of La Palma.

“This collaborative work is an exciting step forward in our collective efforts to gain a greater understanding of our own galaxy and the super-massive black hole at the center of it. It also demonstrates the importance of access to the largest telescopes using advanced cameras/techniques,” Packham said.

Black holes are objects with gravitational fields so strong that even light cannot escape their grasp. The center of almost every galaxy appears to host a black hole, including the Milky Way, where we live. Stars move around the black hole at speeds of up to 800 million kilometres an hour, indicating that it has a mass of at least a million times our Sun. Depending on how the material flows, some of it may eventually be captured and engulfed by the black hole.

Visible light from sources in the center of the Milky Way is blocked by clouds of gas and dust. Infrared light, as well as X-rays and radio, more freely passes through this obscuring material, so astronomers use this to see the region more clearly. CanariCam combines this with a polarising device, which preferentially filters light with the particular characteristics associated with magnetic fields.

“This work, in addition to its scientific relevance, is very important to the advancement of the Ph.D. physics and astronomy program here at UTSA, since it involves students in cutting edge research,” said Miguel Jose Yacaman, professor and Lutcher Brown Endowed Chair of the UTSA Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Centered on the supermassive black hole, the new infrared map covers a region about one light year on each side. The image shows the intensity of infrared light, and traces magnetic field lines within filaments of warm dust grains and hot gas, which appear here as thin lines reminiscent of brush strokes in a painting.

The filaments, several light years long, appear to meet close to the black hole and may indicate where orbits of streams of gas and dust converge. One prominent feature links some of the brightest stars in the center of the galaxy. Despite the strong winds flowing from these stars, the filaments remain in place, bound by the magnetic field within them. Elsewhere the magnetic field is less clearly aligned with the filaments.

The new observations give astronomers more detailed information on the relationship between the bright stars and the dusty filaments. The origin of the magnetic field in this region is not understood, but it is likely that a smaller magnetic field is stretched out as the filaments are elongated by the gravitational influence of the black hole and stars in the galactic center.

“Big telescopes like GTC, and instruments like CanariCam, deliver real results,” Roche said. “We’re now able to watch material race around a black hole 25,000 light years away, and for the first time see magnetic fields there in detail.”

A little-studied, underground layer of rock may provide a vital reservoir for trees, especially in times of drought, report scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and affiliated with The University of Texas (UT) at Austin and the University of California, Berkeley.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), looked at the water stored inside the layer of weathered bedrock that lies under soils in mountain forest ecosystems.

This transitional zone beneath soils and above groundwater is often overlooked when it comes to studying hydrologic processes, but researchers found that the water contained in the fractures and pores of the rock could play an important role in the water cycle at local and global levels.

“There are significant hydrologic dynamics in weathered bedrock environments, but traditionally they are not investigated because they are hard to access,” said lead PNAS author Daniella Rempe, a geoscientist at UT Austin. “Our study was designed to investigate this region.”

Researchers found that water in bedrock can sustain trees through droughts even after the soil has become parched.

At a field site in Northern California’s Mendocino County, scientists found that up to 27 percent of annual rainfall was stored as “rock moisture,” the water clinging to cracks and pores in the bedrock.

The impact of rock moisture varies, the researchers said, depending on region and topography. But it likely explains why trees in the study area showed little effect from the severe 2010-2015 drought, which killed more than 100 million trees throughout California.

“How trees can survive extended periods of severe drought has been a mystery,” said Richard Yuretich, director of NSF’s Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) program.

“This study reveals a significant reservoir of trapped water that had gone unnoticed in the past,” says Yuretich. “Research of this kind can help greatly in managing natural resources during times of environmental stress.”

To conduct the study, scientists monitored rock moisture from 2013 to 2016 at nine wells drilled into weathered bedrock along a steep, forested hillside. They used a neutron probe, a precision tool that measures the amount of water in a sample area by detecting hydrogen.

They found that the weathered rock layer built up a supply of 4 to 21 inches of rock moisture during the winter wet season, depending on the well.

The maximum amount of rock moisture in each well stayed about the same throughout the study period, which included a significant drought year. The finding indicates that the total rainfall amount does not influence the rock moisture levels.

“It doesn’t matter how much it rains in the winter; rock moisture builds up to the same maximum value,” Rempe said. “That leads to the same amount of water being available every summer for use by trees.”

Researchers also found that the average rock moisture at all wells exceeded the average soil moisture measurements at all locations.

“Soils are important, but when it comes to determining if a place is going to experience water stress, it could be the underlying rock that matters most,” Rempe said. “This is the first time this has been demonstrated in a multi-year field study.”

The potential for rock moisture to travel back to the atmosphere by evaporation from tree leaves or to trickle down into groundwater indicates that it could affect the environment and climate on a larger scale.

The study provides a glimpse into rock moisture at a small, intensive research site, according to paper co-author William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley. He said the data collected during the study should be a starting point for more research. “The future paths are many. Now we have just one well-studied site.”

The research was also supported by the Keck Foundation and the University of California Reserve System.

State-run media Xinhua released the government’s proposal on Feb. 25 to kill term limits for China’s head of state, which will be reviewed during the upcoming National People’s Congress — a parliamentary meeting that is mostly symbolic — on March 5.

Because the purpose of the national meeting is to exercise loyalty to the Communist Party, the proposal to scrap term limits from the constitution will be passed.

During Xi’s first five-year term — which ended with him in January enshrining his own doctrine into the Chinese constitution — he has aggressively targeted critics and potential critics, including religious groups.

“Xi has shown himself to be a muscular leader who will move and shake things up to grab more power for himself,” said Maya Wang, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch.

“The consequences for ordinary Chinese people will be bleak — we all remember how, under Mao times, strongman-rule brought unchecked powers and massive suffering for ordinary people.”

Xi has notably passed sweeping laws on religion, seeking to significantly limit religious expression by mostly replacing the worship of deities with the worship of the Communist Party.

While these so-called religious regulations were not promulgated until Feb. 1, Xi has spent much of last year targeting religious groups — such as having iconography of Jesus swapped with that of his own face in southeast rural Jiangxi province, and having party cadres denounce religion in favor of atheism.

Enormous religious sites — including the Jindengtai (Golden Lampstand) Christian mega-church in Shanxi province and much of Larung Gar, one of world’s largest Buddhist institutions, in the Tibetan region — have been recently demolished by the government.

“Whenever the Communist Party is confronted by perceived questions of legitimacy or social instability, it tends to narrow the space for movement in academia, civil society and the mainstream media, and introduce measures that restrict human rights,” said William Nee, a China researcher at Amnesty International.

“With Xi apparently consolidating power for the foreseeable future, it could mean that the more hard-line camp that he is generally associated with could be ascendant for years and years to come.”

Xi has also taken pointed aim at ethnic and religious minorities, especially within the western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region — which has largely transformed into harsh security state.

Within the area — since spring last year — Xi has spurred the proliferation of re-education camps under regional leader Chen Quanguo, where human rights monitors have alleged that thousands from Muslim ethnic minorities have been interned and often forced to denounce their religion and customs. Instead, they are thought to be exposed to Chinese propaganda. It has also been alleged that they are sometimes subjected to hard labor.

“The implications for human rights in China are dire. We have seen continual deterioration in an already horrendous human rights situation under Xi,” said Kevin Carrico, a China expert who lectures at Australia’s Macquarie University.

Late last year, dissident Wang Dan — active in the 1989 Tiananmen movement — wrote about how Chinese students studying in the U.S. were discouraged from attending his forums, fearing reprisal.

Also in November last year, Australian publisher Allen & Unwin delayed the release of a book on domestic Chinese influence that was deemed sensitive, fearing a reaction from Beijing. Just a month before, leading Western publisher Springer Nature also acquiesced to China’s request to censor material perceived to be sensitive.

“This time, Xi is going global — the consequences will be felt well beyond China,” said rights researcher Wang.

China’s constitution currently caps the presidency and vice-presidency at two terms (10 years).

While the amendment also proposes to lift the term limits for the vice-presidency, currently held by Li Yuanchao, it does not strike term limits for the premier position, now served by Li Keqiang.

Whether or not Xi will eventually move on to rule for an unprecedented third term is at this time impossible to predict. Top-level Chinese politics remain a black box.

Scientists, companies and government agencies are hard at work on decreasing greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. In recent years, biofuels produced from corn have emerged as a fuel source to power motor vehicles and, perhaps, airplanes.

But corn is problematic as a biofuel source material. It’s resource-intensive to grow, creates many environmental impacts, and is more useful as food.

A study from Colorado State University finds new promise for biofuels produced from switchgrass, a non-edible native grass that grows in many parts of North America. Scientists used modeling to simulate various growing scenarios, and found a climate footprint ranging from -11 to 10 grams of carbon dioxide per mega-joule — the standard way of measuring greenhouse gas emissions.

To compare with other fuels, the impact of using gasoline results in 94 grams of carbon dioxide per mega-joule.

The study, “High resolution techno-ecological modeling of a bioenergy landscape to identify climate mitigation opportunities in cellulosic ethanol production,” was published online Feb. 19 in Nature Energy.

John Field, research scientist at the Natural Resource Ecology Lab at CSU, said what the team found is significant. “What we saw with switchgrass is that you’re actually storing carbon in the soil,” he said. “You’re building up organic matter and sequestering carbon.”

His CSU research team works on second-generation cellulosic biofuels made from non-edible plant material such as grasses. Cellulose is the stringy fiber of a plant. These grasses, including switchgrass, are potentially more productive as crops and can be grown with less of an environmental footprint than corn.

“They don’t require a lot of fertilizer or irrigation,” Field said. “Farmers don’t have to plow up the field every year to plant new crops, and they’re good for a decade or longer.”

Researchers chose a study site in Kansas since it has a cellulosic biofuel production plant, one of only three in the United States.

The team used DayCent, an ecosystem modeling tool that tracks the carbon cycle, plant growth, and how growth responds to weather, climate and other factors at a local scale. It was developed at CSU in the mid-1990s. The tool allows scientists to predict whether crop production contributes to or helps combat climate change, and how feasible it is to produce certain crops in a given area.

Previous studies on cellulosic biofuels have focused on the engineering details of the supply chain. These details have included analyzing the distance between the farms where the plant material is produced, and the biofuel production plant to which it must be transported. However, the CSU analysis finds that the details of where and how you grow the plant material is just as significant or even more significant for the greenhouse gas footprint of the biofuel, said Field.

The biofuel industry is experiencing challenges, due to low oil prices. The production plant referenced above has new owners and is undergoing a reorganization.

But the future looks bright for biofuels and bioenergy, said Field.

“Biofuels have some capabilities that other renewable energy sources like wind and solar power just don’t have,” said Field. “If and when the price of oil gets higher, we’ll see continued interest and research in biofuels, including the construction of new facilities.”

Join the Ku Klux Klan and get 10 percent off on your next Fed Ex shipment!

Okay, the National Rifle Association isn’t quite the Klan. But it’s getting closer. For years, big corporations had welcomed the opportunity to accumulate more customers by giving discounts to NRA members, even if they pack assault rifles.

Yet in the aftermath of the shootings in Parkland, Florida, and the activism of high school students, corporations are bailing out of their deals with the NRA.

As we’ve seen with the corporate firings of sleazebag movie moguls and predatory television personalities, nothing concentrates the minds of CEOs like a moral protest that’s gaining traction.

As I said, the NRA isn’t the Klan, but since Trump became president it’s behaved like a subsidiary of the alt-right.

At last week’s CPAC conference, NRA president Wayne LaPierre cloaked his pro-gun address in paranoia about a “tidal wave” of “European-style socialists bearing down upon us,” telling his audience “you should be frightened.”

Most Americans know this kind of talk is bonkers. Not incidentally, most Americans also want gun controls. Ninety-seven percent support universal background checks and 70 percent favor registering all guns with the police.

Preventing gun violence is coming to be seen less as an issue of “gun rights” and more about public morality. “Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?“ Obama asked in 2012, after twenty first-graders were massacred at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Obama got nowhere, of course, but now change seems to be in the air. Why? I think Donald Trump deserves some credit. .

Trump’s response to the slayings in Parkland has been to urge schools to arm teachers. The proposal is not only wrongheaded – more than 30 studies have shown that additional guns increase gun violence and homicides – but profoundly immoral.

If the only way to control gun violence is for all Americans arm themselves, we would all be living in a social Darwinist hell.

The moral void of Donald Trump has been a catastrophe for America in many ways, but it’s contributing to a backlash against the systemic abuses of power on which so much violence in American life is founded.

The Parkland students are insisting that adults stand up to the immorality of the NRA. Corporations are responding. So are politicians. “We get out there and make sure everybody knows how much money their politician took from the NRA,” said David Hogg, one of the students.

Similarly, the #MeToo movement is insisting that America wake up to the immoral behavior of powerful predatory men.

Harvey Weinstein and his ilk aren’t killers but they are accused of assaulting and even raping women whose careers depended on them.

For years, these women didn’t dare raise their voices. They were told this was the way the system worked, much as we’ve been told for years there’s no way to take on the NRA.

Would the #MeToo movement have erupted without the abuser-in-chief in the Oval Office? Maybe. But Trump’s personal history – 19 women have accused him of sexual misconduct – has helped fuel it.

The #BlackLivesMatter movement predated Trump, but our racist-in-chief – who criticizes black athletes for protesting police violence – has given it new meaning and urgency as well.

The NRA’s position that everyone should carry a gun contrasts with the reality that a black man brandishing one could quite possibly be shot and killed by the police.

The cumulative and growing force of these three intertwined movements comes from a basic premise of our civic life together, which Trump’s moral obtuseness has brought into sharp focus.

In order to survive, people need several things – food, water, a roof over our heads. But the most basic of all is safety. That’s why governments were created in the first place.

If Americans can’t be secure from someone packing an assault rifle, or from the predatory behavior of powerful men, or from the police, we do not live in a functioning society.

Make no mistake. This is all about power – a powerful political lobby that has bullied America for too long, powerful men who haven’t been held accountable for their behavior, police who for too long have been unconstrained.

A moral movement is growing against the violence perpetrated by all of them, making it necessary for both government and business to take action.

It is being led by people whose moral authority cannot be denied: students whose friends have been murdered, women who have been abused, the parents and partners of black men who have been slain.

It is already having a profound impact on America.

One of the most unfortunate aspects of Western research on Russia is that most people examining that country have ignored new information on little known events in Soviet times despite the ways in which new reports shed light on how that system operated and on how its successors function as well.

The last few days have brought articles containing new information about three intriguing events: a planned revolt by an OGPU officer against the system his organization helped maintain, risings by Western Belarusians forced into the ranks of the Soviet Army at the end of World War II, and the largest ever revolt by GULAG political prisoners at Vorkutlag in 1942.

Even a Chekist Can Rebel against the Chekist State

Any “individual who stands up against the system in a totalitarian state is doomed,” the editors of the Taiga news service say; “but what if this individual is not a simple mortal but an officer of the special services?” That happened in 1933 in the Altay (http://tayga.info/139082, using barnaul.fm/2018/02/20/vosstanie-altajskogo-chekista/ http://tayga.info/139082).

In Stalin’s times, Mikhail Kleymyonov, an OGPU officer who was a native of Altay Kray, was so horrified by the fabrication of cases, torture, and mass executions carried out by his colleagues that he began to plan an uprising against Soviet power in the Troitsk and Biisk districts where he had relatives and many friends. He chose as X hour August 1, 1933.

He assembled a small group of people of similar mind; and they began to prepare for an armed uprising. Unfortunately, one of them appears to have been betrayed. And Kleymyonov was forced to flee into China where his OGPU comrades assumed he would stay. But instead, he changed his name and returned to the USSR settling in Alma-Ata.

Still unhappy with what he saw around him, he decided in 1948 to flee to Iran or Turkey. Unfortunately for him, he was caught by the Ministry for State Security which viewed his arrest as a great victory because they were certain that Kleymyonov has “long ago fled to the Chinese” and was beyond their reach.

They dispatched him the GULAG, but he remained alive. And in 1960, after his release, he appealed for rehabilitation arguing that he was horrified by what Stalinists had done but that he personally had committed no crimes against the Soviet people. Despite Khrushchev being in the midst of his anti-Stalin campaign, Kleymyonov’s request was refused.

But his case suggests that there were more angry Chekists than the standard histories indicate and that at least some of them were prepared to take things into their own hands.

Belarusians Revolted When Forced into Soviet Army

In order to fill the depleted ranks of Red Army units in 1945, commanders drafted people from the local population in the western borderlands. Among them were many Western Belarusians who did not want to fight for the USSR and hoped that they could become Poles and Polish soldiers. To that end, some of them revolted against their officers.

“By the spring of 1945, a significant part of such newly minted soldiers consisted of people from Western Belarus, a territory which during the war was for a long time under the Germans,” Russian historians say, adding that SMERSH concluded that these men did not want to fight for Moscow (russian7.ru/post/bunt-v-krasnoy-armii-v-marte-1945-goda-chto-p/).

Many of these people considered themselves to be Poles and “were convinced that Western Belarus should be given to Poland;” and they wanted to serve in the Polish army which was suffering significantly smaller losses than were units of the Red Army nearby. The center of the revolt was the 34^th Division, and its soldiers revolted on March 23.

They locked up their officers, seized guns, and deserted in large numbers. When the Soviet security services restored order, they concluded that disaffection among the Belarusians was so great that the only solution was to send these soldiers to distant parts of the Soviet Union even though that reduced the size of the Soviet attacking forces.

Political Prisoners Lead a Mass Revolt in Vorkutlag, Make Plans to Seize Entire Region

The largest revolt in GULAG history was led by political prisoners allied with free workers in the Lesoreid camp in the Komi ASSR in January 1942. They worked closely with a civilian worker named Retyunin for whom the uprising has been named and who was clever enough to get weapons (russian7.ru/post/retyuninskoe-vosstanie-pervyy-myatezh-z/).

On the first day of the rising, the prisoners led by Retyunin overpowered the guards, cut the camp off from the outside world, and started to march toward civilian facilities like the town and airport. The security forces didn’t know what happened until after everything began, and they were located in the wrong places to stop things immediately.

Once it became obvious how serious the revolt was, the Soviet security police brought in heavy weapons and gave battle. Forty-two prisoners and free employees who joined them were killed; but so too were 33 guards. Once the revolt was suppressed, 68 people were charged with violating Soviet laws, and 50 were sentenced to death.

The point in each of these cases is not that they succeeded but that they acted at all, something many histories of the Stalin period have ignored. Indeed, suggestions that Russians and especially politicals bowed to the authorities at that time abound, even in the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Such views were demolished in an important if little known pamphlet published by an émigré writer in 1974. Entitled How We Submitted and written by Yury Srechinsky, he called attention to many cases in which Russians as well as non-Russians revolted even if they were doomed to fail.

Information about such resistance is becoming more available if not always widely attended to. Recently, Moscow commentator Andrey Illarionov compiled a list of more than 210 revolts by Soviet citizens against Soviet power that were not part of the Civil War (echo.msk.ru/blog/aillar/2003620-echo/).

Illarionov concedes that even his list is incomplete. The three cases mentioned here are the tip of a very large iceberg, one that should encourage those who believe that the Russians and non-Russians can resist and rise up even against the most fearful opponents and that should at the same time frighten those who think they can rule by fear and intimidation alone.

The anticipated economic and strategic windfall from environmental change in the Arctic has spurred China to officially enunciate an Arctic policy. Key to note are: 1) the starring role the Belt and Road Initiative plays in China’s engagement in the Arctic, and 2) the approach of using international law to justify Chinese entry and activity in the Arctic. The question that emerges is whether these two approaches — China’s BRI on the one hand and international law and norms on the other — will eventually be at cross-purpose.

By Ritika Passi*

The last frontier for exploration is being breached.

Last August, a Russian-owned LNG tanker with a unique reinforced steel hull became the first vessel to travel from Norway to South Korea, through the Northern Sea Route (NSR) along the Russian Arctic coast, without the aid of an ice-breaking vessel, and that too in merely 19 days. US president Trump, within his first 100 days, signed an executive order calling for a review of the former president’s plan that blocked offshore drilling in the polar regions. Finland and Norway are studying the viability and profitability of an Arctic Railway project that would connect the Nordic region to the Arctic coast, offering pathways into Europe all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, and along the Russian NSR to Asian markets.

China, too, has staked claim. A non-Arctic littoral — or, as it calls itself, a “Near-Arctic state” — China released its official Arctic policy at the end of last month, coming on the heels of increasing activity and visibility in the region in question that is raising eyebrows and anxieties. The white paper declares China as “an important stakeholder in Arctic affairs” and reveals an expanding playground in which China sees itself as a legitimate actor. Retreating ice in the Arctic and its repercussions — effect on local climate and environment and domestic agriculture and marine industries, waterway and resource development in the Arctic — are matters “vital to the existence and development of all countries and humanity, and directly affect the interests of non-Arctic States including China.”

Motivations

These interests are both economic and strategic. Reduced shipping costs given shorter routes between Asia and Europe, as compared to the traditional Malacca Strait and Suez Canal route, benefit foreign trade and strengthen energy security for China. Indeed, as the policy document states: “The utilization of sea routes and exploration and development of the resources in the Arctic may have a huge impact on the energy strategy and economic development of China, which is a major trading nation and energy consumer in the world.” 90% of China’s trade is seaborne, so even small differences in time taken could mean big savings and greater profits. For instance, it normally takes 48 days for container ships to reach Rotterdam from China. Passage through the Arctic would reduce Europe to Asia distances by anywhere between 20% to 40%. There are even time and cost savings if ships set course from southern Chinese ports — the distance between Hong Kong and Northwestern Europe is still shorter by as much as 14%.

An important, inter-related factor is China’s ever-enhancing shipping power and increasing role in shipping finance. China’s state-owned shipping company, Cosco, is the largest shipping company outside of Europe, and China today lays claim to the third-largest merchant ship fleet in the world. This is reflective of not only the shipping industry’s importance to China’s economy, but also the key role China’s growing merchant fleet and shipping finance industry are set to play in the rolling out of China’s maritime trade and infrastructure vision — including in the Arctic — in a bid to better control its maritime trade.

The Arctic also allows transportation through a more politically peaceable environment and is thus a more secure alternative to bottlenecked waters prone to piracy and which are dominated by a strategic competitor. Close to 70% of China’s energy needs are met by seaborne imports. The lure of undiscovered oil and natural gas resources — anywhere between one-fifth and a quarter of untapped fossil fuel resources, potentially altogether worth as much as $35 trillion — throw up alternative energy sources that China can tap and thus bolster its energy security. The US Geological Survey pegs 30% of the world’s undiscovered natural gas and 13% of undiscovered oil reserves in the Arctic. Not to forget what are thought to be considerable deposits of mineable minerals — gold, silver, diamond, copper, nickel, titanium, graphite, uranium — and, crucial for the manufacturing of high-tech products like electric cars and smartphones, rare earth elements, such as lithium and cobalt. Clearly at play is a longer-term vision to secure future trade routes to markets and resources.

The other strategic motivation implied is of course the desire to play a bigger role in trans-regional and global issues — and not just as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, a fact that is included in the policy document as a rationale for China jointly shouldering the cause of peace and security in the Arctic, or under a vision of “shared future for mankind,” also liberally invoked throughout the document. The Arctic is a new sphere — previously inaccessible — where China wants to play a leading role, “since the traditional areas are already taken by the old powers,” as notes Jin Canrong at Renmin University.

Critically, given the continued reality of climate change in the Arctic, the development of this region will see new technologies and ‘economic biomes’ come to the fore. This will not only catapult the Arctic as a major theatre of activity — economic and geopolitical — in the coming future, but will also define science and sustainability in the 21st century.

Engagement

Given this context, it is hardly surprising that the Chinese white paper on the Arctic advances a “Polar Silk Road” under the ambit of its broader Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), considering the starring role the BRI is already playing in advancing “Xiplomacy” (think the Two Centenaries and the “Chinese Dream”). At first glance, the Chinese mandate primarily encourages its enterprises to develop shipping routes, including infrastructure construction, conduct commercial trial voyages, and operation of these shipping routes. Other areas, such as energy cooperation, blue economy, and tourism, are not directly linked to the Polar Silk Road. But these are already existing fields of Chinese engagement under the BRI. Digital connectivity is also specifically mentioned. China is likely to use the BRI as a key vehicle to fulfill its stated policy goals (“to understand, protect, develop and participate in the governance of the Arctic”).

While Beijing has been active in the Arctic since it bought its first icebreaker from Ukraine in 1994, recent years have seen an uptick in Chinese engagement. Not only has China’s only icebreaker now navigated the three major shipping routes through the Arctic, a Chinese ship carrying 19,000 tonnes of cargo became the first container vessel ever in 2013 to transit the NSR to reach Rotterdam from Dalian — and that too in a month’s time compared to the 45 days it normally takes through the Suez Canal. China also became an observer in the Arctic Council, the highest-level body governing the Polar North, in 2013. In fact, Chinese president Xi Jinping even referred to China as an “upcoming ‘polar-region power” during a state visit to Australia in 2014.

Research of navigational routes, as well as that of climate and environmental changes in the Arctic, and exploration of the region’s potential resources are part of the ambit of this blue economic corridor. (An earlier paper by the State Oceanic Administration referred to the Northwest Passage as a “northern link” in BRI.)

On the ground, Russia’s NSR is already a strategic area of cooperation between China and the largest Arctic state as part of the BRI — Xi and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin signed a joint declaration in July last year that invoked an “Ice Silk Road,” under which the NSR Route will be developed. (But note that the Chinese Arctic white paper does not highlight the NSR or any particular Arctic route as the preferred shipping route Chinese companies will pursue.) The Yamal LNG project is the primary and largest Sino-Russian venture in this regard, which is expected to supply China with four million tonnes of LNG per year, transported through the NSR and reaching China in just 15 days, less than half the time it would take using the traditional shipping route around Europe and through the Suez Canal.^[1] The Silk Road Fund holds a 9.9% stake, and the China National Petroleum Corporation, 20%; Chinese banks have partly funded the project; and 60% of the equipment has been contributed by Chinese companies. Cosco is all set to send six ships to transport equipment, steel, pulp, and other items along the NSR. Engagement in Russia’s Far East, including in oil and gas fields; construction of ice-class cargo vessels; and a deepwater port on the northwestern Russian coast are Sino-Russian projects on the cards.

At the same time, China has also approached other Arctic littorals. While none of the other Arctic states are officially part of the BRI, they are members of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (thus firmly within the scope of the BRI) and are actively engaged in Arctic projects that are likely to be subsumed under the BRI umbrella. For instance, Chinese mining companies are active in the Canadian Arctic and Greenland. Last year saw China particularly amplify its interaction with Finland, which is currently chair of the Arctic Council until 2019. Xi became the first Chinese president to visit the Nordic state in 22 years. The first China-Finland iron silk road began operating last November, the first railway to link China with the Nordic region. Both are jointly building a second Chinese icebreaker, to be completed in 2019. And recently, China began discussing a 10,500-km fibre optic across the Arctic to create the fastest digital highway between Europe and China as early as 2020. The proposal involves Finland, Norway, Russia, and Japan. Xi has even reached out to Alaska, making an unexpected stop on his way back home post the China-US bilateral summit in April last year. There, he was apparently offered “a generation’s worth” of LNG supply by the governor.

BRI and international law: Convergence or clash?

China’s Arctic policy — insofar as the ambition and the policy goals are concerned — is not a surprise. The inclusion of the BRI as a means of fulfilling China’s stated aims in the Arctic necessarily means the appearance of similar parameters and principles — and indeed, “respect,” “cooperation,” and “win-win result” undergird Chinese activity in this specific geography as well. “Sustainability” is understandably given greater weight in this policy document.

In practice, what does pursuing an Arctic policy through BRI as a primary vehicle mean? The Chinese trade and infrastructure initiative has already gained nomenclature as the “hardware” of Chinese — pick one — hegemony/power projection/Sino-centric Asian and world order. As such, the Arctic, too, is being hardwired into a hub-and-spokes architecture, with China at the centre, that can then be supplemented with policies, norms, and practices. Indeed, as political scientist Michael Byers has said, “They (Chinese companies) are starting to do in Arctic what they are doing elsewhere: they are investing in infrastructure, they are buying foreign companies, they are competing for leases in oil and mineral extraction.”

Against this context, the repeated stress on abiding by international law is noteworthy in the policy document. Given that China is a non-Arctic state, it has clearly used the principles of international law to justify an uncontested and unbarred entrance into the Arctic region: “States from outside the region do not have territorial sovereignty in the Arctic, but they do have rights in respect of scientific research, navigation, overflight, fishing, laying of submarine cables and pipelines in the high seas and other relevant sea areas in the Arctic Ocean, and rights to resource exploration and exploitation in the Area, pursuant to treaties such as UNCLOS and general international law.” The reiteration that Arctic shipping must be conducted in accordance to international law further seems logical when taking into account existing territorial disputes among the Arctic littorals — such as the Northwest Route, which Canada sees as its internal waters, but the US claims as an international waterway. Clearly, for China to pursue its interests in this region, an understanding of Arctic waters as international commons — and thus freely navigable — is critical. Such an interpretation is possible through the UNCLOS framework.

China’s implementation of the BRI on the ground and the intended use of the BRI to carve a different world order (“all roads lead to Beijing”) stands as a counterpoint to the understanding of the Arctic as an international commons where, as indicated by the policy document, China will abide by all international legal instruments, treaties, and mechanisms of pertinent institutions, like the International Maritime Organization. Indeed, as Chinese and polar politics specialist Anne-Marie Brady states, “China’s focus on becoming a polar great power represents a fundamental reorientation — a completely new way of imagining the world” — and the polar region is one new strategic playground where China will build and prove its burgeoning power. Will this alternative world vision give appropriate right of way to international law and treaties? The short shrift given to UNCLOS closer home in the South China Sea could very well bely any true commitment on the part of China to accepted norms beyond, perhaps, an opportunity to allay concerns of revisionist designs.

Responses to China’s official Arctic policy run to both extremes. Some are crying wolf and calling it a cover for a more subversive strategy; others believe China is only stepping up as a responsible nation, and any irresponsible activity will undermine its credibility – and that the policy itself is a clear statement against which to measure its behaviour. While China’s capital is in high demand among the Arctic states as well — infrastructure investment needs are to the tune of $1 trillion over the next 15 years — commercial shipping through the Arctic is unlikely until at least 2040 given existing environmental, technological, and financial challenges. Matters of environment and sustainability, navigation security, and dual-use infrastructure will become salient in the meantime. Chinese behaviour and actions will ultimately determine whether BRI implementation practices converge with the upholding of international law that China promises in its official Arctic policy.

About the author:
*Ritika Passi is Project Editor and Associate Fellow at ORF. Her research focuses on issues of connectivity, security and development. She is currently working on the Belt and Road Initiative and the International North-South Transport Corridor. In an editorial capacity, she is in charge of ideating, coordinating and producing special projects. She oversees the Global Policy Journal-ORF series. She is the editor of the ORF Primer, which ran for two years, and co-editor of ORF Raisina Files 2017. 

Source:
This article was published by the Observer Research Foundation.

Notes:
[1] The first shipment occurred in December last year, marking the start of commercial operations.

The European Council added the Minister of Industry and the Minister of Information of the government of Syria on Monday to the list of those targeted by EU restrictive measures against the Syrian regime in view of the gravity of the situation in the country. These additions were made to take into account recent ministerial changes, as both ministers were appointed in January 2018.

The decision brings to 257 persons the total number of persons targeted by a travel ban and an assets freeze for being responsible for the violent repression against the civilian population in Syria, benefiting from or supporting the regime, and/or being associated with such persons.

In addition, 67 entities are targeted by an assets freeze. More broadly, sanctions currently in place against Syria include an oil embargo, restrictions on certain investments, a freeze of the assets of the Syrian central bank held in the EU, export restrictions on equipment and technology that might be used for internal repression as well as on equipment and technology for the monitoring or interception of internet or telephone communications.

These measures were last extended on May 29, 2017 and are in place until June 1, 2018.

“The EU remains committed to finding a lasting political solution to the conflict in Syria under the existing UN-agreed framework. As stated in the EU strategy on Syria adopted in April 2017, the EU believes that there can be no military solution to the conflict and strongly supports the work of the UN Special Envoy and the intra-Syrian talks in Geneva,” the Council said in a statement.

The core region of the Atacama Desert in South America is one of the most arid places on earth. Sometimes it is raining only once in a decade or even less, the annual precipitation is far less than 20 mm.

The dry conditions resulted in high salt concentrations in the soil and low organic matter content. However, scientists have found microorganisms there. But it has remained unclear whether these environments support active microbial growth or whether the observed cells were introduced by wind transport and subsequently degraded.

Detailed analyses by an international research team show: Even in the most arid zones of the Atacama a microbial community exists which becomes metabolically active following episodic increase in moisture after rainfalls. The new findings, published in the journal PNAS, are important for evolution of life and landscapes on Earth. Moreover, the results have implications for the prospect of life on other planets – certainly for Mars.

The scientists took soil samples at six different locations in the Atacama Desert between 2015 and 2017.

“We have chosen sample locations along a profile of decreasing moisture from the coast up to extreme arid conditions in the core region of the Atacama”, explains first author Dirk Schulze-Makuch from the TU Berlin. “This gradient should be reflected in the life-friendly conditions – we call it habitability – as well as in the number and diversity of the microorganisms.”

To get the whole picture the scientists used a broad range of complementary methods carried out at several geoscientific institutions in Berlin and Potsdam together with international partners. Amongst others the team conducted physico-chemical characterizations of the soil habitability and molecular biological studies. The latter were done mainly at GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam where intracellular and extracellular DNA was analysed.

“With this method we can find out which microorganisms really exist at the different locations in the Atacama probably doing metabolism and which ones are only represented by their naked DNA in the sediment as a signal from the past,” said Dirk Wagner, Head of GFZ-Section for Geomicrobiology and one of the leading authors of the article. “Further investigations like tests on enzymes have shown that the suspected organisms in most cases are in fact metabolically active.”

To scientists it is not only important to know where microbial life exists, it is also relevant to know about changes over time. Here they were lucky: First sampling in April 2015 occurred shortly after an unexpected rain event. The moisture had positive effects on life and activity in the desert. This is documented in samples taken and analysed in the following years in February 2016 and January 2017.

“We can clearly show that some time after a precipitation event, the abundance and biological activity of microorganisms decreases”, said Wagner. But the organisms, which are predominantly bacteria, do not completely die off.

According to the authors, single-celled organisms are found mainly in the deeper layers of the Atacama Desert where they have formed active communities for millions of years and have evolved to cope with the harsh conditions.

The findings from the South American desert are very useful for the question of life on other planets, especially in relation to Mars. Martian climate was initially humid, rivers and lakes had existed before the desertification began. No rain can fall from the thin Martian atmosphere today but liquid water can be present near the surface due to nightly snowfall.

Additionally, there is fog and on some slopes also salty brines, which sporadically flow down and thus provide fluids. However, the exposure to hard radiation at the surface is much greater than on Earth. Based on the results of the study, the authors come to the conclusion: If life ever evolved on Mars in the past, under better conditions, it could have endured the transition to hyper-arid conditions and perhaps even be found in subsurface niches today.

By Franco Frattini*

(EurActiv) — Today the Foreign Affairs Council will sit for lunch with the most powerful foreign ministers and officials in the Arab World. Only one item is on the agenda: the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

With everything else going on in the region, it has incredibly become a forgotten crisis and the EU is right to try and keep it atop the international agenda, while we wait for Trump’s long-anticipated Middle East peace plan.

The EU has already met with Benjamin Netanyahu and with Mahmoud Abbas; it is now looking to the Arab stakeholders. The issue suits Brussels’ initiative; it would enhance Europe’s role in a region that doesn’t look West very much these days.

Unfortunately, there also are more immediate and concerning issues for the region’s stability and security. Chief among them is Iran, which currently presides over a web of proxies and militias that stretches from the Gulf to the Mediterranean at the risk of wider conflict between major powers.

The regime in Tehran is not prepared to coexist peacefully with its rivals, namely Israel and Saudi Arabia, and has therefore implemented a destabilising foreign policy of interference within the borders of its enemies’ neighbours, without regard to sovereignty or the wellbeing of the local populations.

In Lebanon and Syria, this manifests as extreme military installations on the Israeli borders and the inflammation of sectarian tensions. In Yemen, it is the escalation and preservation of a deadly civil war to Saudi Arabia’s immediate south.

The strategy intends to ensure that Iran’s rivals spend a significant amount of their energies and resources on self-defence. The region will not be able to move forwards unless Tehran decides that the strategy no longer serves its best interests. This is where Europe might be able to play a role.

Europeans still have the expertise and credibility needed to negotiate with Tehran, which could not convincingly be said of many other players. They have the leverage, both economic and political.

Iran knows very well that complete isolation from the West is not in its interests but deeply distrusts the Americans and the current US administration shows no desire to engage Teheran. So the diplomatic challenge of preserving the nuclear accord, while containing Iranian destabilising conduct, falls to the Europeans.

The FAC should, therefore, close ranks with the Arab participants on future Iran strategy, with a view to enlisting their support for any European diplomatic efforts involving Tehran.

Arab Gulf countries’ international relevance to peace and security cannot be overstated. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are among our most essential intelligence and counter-terror partners, and they are the ones currently doing the heavy lifting in security terms, containing and apprehending the remnants of ISIS.

Terrorism has created a security continuum between Europe and the Arabian peninsula which makes the Gulf look like the ‘third shore’ of the Mediterranean. The upcoming visit of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to some European capitals will provide another key opportunity to emphasise Europe’s commitment to this partnership, without which no Iran containment will succeed.

Monday’s lunch comes at a moment when Israel and Iran are on the verge of military confrontation in Syria. Tehran has also been stepping up its support to Hamas in Gaza. Unlike its Arab neighbours, Iran has never supported the peace process and has actively sought to undermine it through Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Should Iran constrain rather than encourage its proxies, it would at least remove one major irritant from the negotiations.

I can understand why the FAC meeting will want to concentrate on the Palestinian issue, but the most pressing concerns in the region at the moment should not be forgotten. Until Iran can be persuaded to take a more constructive role, to respect the sovereignty, and to prioritise cooperation, Arab leaders and Israel will be too distracted by the Iranian challenge to devote sufficient serious attention to the Israel-Palestine process.

The Arab leaders arriving Monday know that they are coming to discuss Jerusalem and Oslo, but they should be reassured that the EU recognises there are other clear and present dangers to the region.

The JCPOA was never intended to be the final round of talks: its scope was so limited because of the scale of the Iranian challenge, not because it was felt that the Iran problem was nuclear-only. The decision was taken to contain Iran in phases.

But if the Europeans can lead a successful second round on the actual dangerous aspects of Iran’s foreign policy, now that the potential aspects have been dealt with, then the accomplishment would surpass its predecessor and, most importantly, immediately transform the region by giving millions of people a chance to live in an age of progress rather than die in an era of war.

*Franco Frattini served as the Italian foreign minister from 2002- 2004 and 2008-2011.

The Gulf crisis that has pitted World Cup host Qatar against a United Arab Emirates-Saudi Arabia-led alliance for the past eight months is showing up the fiction of a separation of sports and politics.

Regional and international soccer bodies seeking to police the ban on a mixing of sports and politics are discovering that it amounts to banging their heads against a wall. As they attempted in recent months to halt politics from subverting Asian tournaments, domestic and regional politics seeped into the game via different avenues.

Soccer governance bodies have long struggled to maintain the fiction of a separation in a trade off that gave regulators greater autonomy and created the breeding ground for widespread corruption while allowing governments and politicians to manipulate the sport to their advantage as long as they were not too blatant about it.

The limits of that deal are being defined in the Middle East, a region wracked by conflict where virtually everything is politicized. While bodies like FIFA, the world soccer regulator, and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), have focused in recent months on the Gulf crisis, Saudi domestic politics as well as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Saudi-Iranian rivalry reared their ugly heads.

Saudi businessman Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, in one of his first public acts since being released from three months of detention in Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton hotel and in a demonstration of fealty to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, donated $533,000 to Saudi soccer club Al Hilal FC.

Prince Alwaleed, who was among the more recalcitrant of the hundreds of members of Saudi Arabia’s ruling family, senior officials, and prominent businessmen in what amounted to a power and asset grab under the mum of an anti-corruption campaign, said the donation was in response to a call by the government.

Saudi authorities said they expected to collect some $106 billion in assets and funds from released detainees as a result of the campaign, yet that figure is in doubt.

“It has come as no surprise that the total haul will be a mere fraction of the sum anticipated… Authorities are only counting on the acquisition of $13.3 billion in settlements by the end of the year, equivalent to the amount of revenue the country would receive from a small increase in the oil price,” said Ambrose Carey, director of Alaco, a London-based business intelligence consultancy, who has been involved in some of the most high profile asset-tracing cases in past decades, and an expert on Saudi Arabia.

Prince Mohammed reportedly had demanded that Prince Alwaleed, one of the world’s richest men with investments in a host of Western blue chips, pay $6 billion for his release. It is not known on what terms he was set free.

Similarly, limits to Prince Mohammed’s power and contrasting efforts by Gulf rivals to forge closer covert relations with Israel and woo the American Jewish community played out on multiple sports arenas.

Media reporting on this month’s participation of Israeli teams in a handball tournament in Doha suggested that social media criticism may have been engineered, a fixture of the Gulf crisis, that was sparked last May by fake news published on Qatari websites in a hack allegedly engineered by the United Arab Emirates. “It is not known whether the tweets critical of Doha actually originated from Qatar,” Agence France Press reported in its coverage of the criticism.

Despite Israeli athletes repeatedly competing in tournaments in the Gulf over the years, Prince Mohammed, the heir-apparent to the title of Custodian of the Holy Cities, Mecca and Medina, opted not to risk criticism by barring Israeli players from participating in a chess match in December in the kingdom.

The decision suggested that Prince Mohammed was walking a tightrope in prioritizing the kingdom’s rivalry with Iran at the expense of the Palestinian issue in his relations with Israel and the Trump administration.

Its on the soccer pitch, however, that Gulf states may hit a wall in the willingness of international sports associations to look the other way in their increasingly difficult effort to maintain the fiction that sports and politics are separate as the divide in the region spills onto the field and Saudi Arabia and the UAE seek to engineer an environment in which Qatar would be deprived of its World Cup hosting rights.

In an indication of the importance Gulf leaders attribute to Qatar’s ability to garner soft power on the soft pitch, Dubai security chief Lt. Gen. Dhahi Khalfan suggested in October that the UAE-Saudi-led diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar would be lifted if the Gulf state surrendered its hosting rights.

That may have been an overstatement by the notoriously bombastic law enforcement official, but nonetheless reflected thinking about the political importance of sports in Qatar and among its detractors.

The political manipulation of sports in the Gulf crisis has however prompted FIFA to closely monitor the Saudi and UAE efforts while the AFC has put its foot down in preventing the Gulf crisis from shaping the Asian Champions League following incidents in December during the Gulf Cup in Kuwait.

Pro-Qatari and Spanish media said state-controlled Saudi media had offered Bahraini players bonuses during the Gulf Cup if they “defeated the (Qatari) terrorists”. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, together with Bahrain and Egypt, accuse the Gulf state of funding militants and political violence.

Saudi and UAE players and officials, moreover, refused to participate in news conferences in which Qatari media were present.

The AFC thwarted a UAE-Saudi attempt to get Asian tournament matches that were scheduled to be hosted by Qatar moved to a neutral venue. The AFC warned the two countries that they would be penalized if they failed to play in Doha or host Qatari teams.

As a result, an Asian Champions League game in Abu Dhabi between Al Gharafa of Qatar and Al Jazira of the UAE constituted the first breach of the eight-month old boycott of the idiosyncratic Gulf state.

The AFC and FIFA’s record in dealing with the inseparable relationship between sports and politics in the Gulf is, however, at best mixed.

In a bizarre and contradictory sequence of events at the outset of the Gulf crisis, FIFA president Gianni Infantino rejected involving the group in the dispute by saying that “the essential role of FIFA, as I understand it, is to deal with football and not to interfere in geopolitics.”

Yet, on the same day that he made his statement, Mr. Infantino waded into the crisis by removing a Qatari referee from a 2018 World Cup qualifier at the request of the UAE. FIFA, beyond declaring that the decision was taken “in view of the current geopolitical situation,” appeared to be saying by implication that a Qatari by definition of his nationality could not be an honest arbiter of a soccer match involving one of his country’s detractors. In FIFA’s decision, politics trumped professionalism, no pun intended.

Similarly, the AFC has been less principled in its stand towards matches pitting Saudi Arabia and Iran against one another. Iranian club Traktor Sazi was forced earlier this month to play its home match against Al Ahli of Jeddah in Oman. It wasn’t clear why the AFC did not uphold the principle it imposed on Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia in the case of Iran.

“Saudi teams have been able to select host stadiums and cities, and Saudi teams will host two Iranian football representatives in the UAE and Kuwait. In return, Iranian football representatives should be able to use their own rights to choose neutral venues, ” said Mohammad Reza Saket, the head of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Football Federation in a recent letter to the AFC.