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The Relationship Between Money, Oil And Weapons – OpEd

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By Abdulrahman Al-Rashed*

Relations between states are based on interests; this sentence is frequently repeated and remains valid in understanding politics. Saudi Arabia’s relationship with the United States, the region’s most established and longest lasting relationship with Washington, is no exception.

The Americans discovered oil in Saudi Arabia about 80 years ago, while other countries’ explorations failed. They established a new oil entity in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s, led by Standard Oil. The relationship between the two countries has continued; Riyadh has considered the US a strategic partner since the 1950s, and vice versa.

Naturally, the two partners cannot agree on all the issues and interests, but the relationship has been beneficial for both sides. However, it suffered a setback under the previous US administration, when US interest in this region declined and Washington’s interests in the Asia-Pacific countries were thought to be more important than those in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia. That view did not persist after Donald Trump became president; although the relationship remains within the context of interests, regardless of expectations and the president’s identity.

Moreover, it is not true that the US is an open market for whoever wants to buy weapons, as some comments on President Trump’s statement  — when he talked about arms sales in the presence of the Saudi crown prince — suggested. The US had refused to sell arms to Saudi Arabia in 1987, even though large amounts of money were involved, as well as in 2008 during the Bush administration. President Obama also stopped arming Saudi Arabia a month before he left office.

But despite these setbacks, Saudi Arabia for the most part has succeeded in winning the arguments over the supply of armaments from one of the most important manufacturers of the best weapons in the world, America. Saudi Arabia had a famous battle over AWACS aircraft in the early 1980s, which it won by a small margin of votes in Congress. Many countries’ requests to buy American weapons were refused; others failed to get the approval of Congress, while some were formulated in an impossible way, as was the case with Pakistan, which Senator Rand Paul described as a “frenemy.” Some requests were even rejected outright, as was the case with Taiwan.

The biggest challenge to Saudi Arabia was when the previous US administration decided to stop supplying ammunition and providing military intelligence, without which the air war in Yemen would be almost impossible. Together with military deals comes the special political relationship, which is just as important, and which makes countries such as Iran take extra care when dealing with the Kingdom. Consequently, interests, viewed as a balance that holds the relationship, remain generally in our favor. A relationship between two countries that is based on economic and military cooperation delivers the most desired outcome.

What distinguishes Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to the US is that he represents a new Saudi project — or, perhaps more accurately, a new Saudi Arabia; a country that is heading toward change, and government and community development. His project has nothing to do with America or Britain. The project of change is directed toward Saudi Arabia and the Saudis, as he himself says. This resolves the crisis of a stereotypical image and societal relations, and represents one of the problems of Saudi relations with the world as a whole. It sees him as a state modernizer and a pragmatic reformer.

The reason why he was warmly welcomed on his visit to Britain, and is now welcomed in the US, is because he began implementing his planned program two years ago. Even opponents of Saudi Arabia received him with appreciation and recognition of his seriousness. Thus, it does not matter how some may try to explain the quest to improve relations with major powers, especially, the US.

Indeed, these relations are based on historical and pragmatic foundations, including important interests and a realistic view in which each side does not expect what the other side may not be able to deliver.

Abdulrahman Al-Rashed is a veteran columnist. He is the former general manager of Al Arabiya news channel, and former editor-in-chief of Asharq Al-Awsat.


Russia Spokesperson Says ‘Scary’ That Boris Johnson Represents A Nuclear Power

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British foreign minister Boris Johnson is poisoned with hatred and anger so it is scary that he represents a nuclear power, Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman said on Wednesday.

Maria Zakharova was commenting on Johnson’s earlier statement that compared Russia’s hosting of this year’s World Cup to the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany.

Any such parallels and comparisons between our country, that lost millions of lives in the fight against Nazism, fought with an enemy on its own territory, and then liberated Europe [and Nazi Germany] are absolutely unacceptable,” she said, in a statement published on Facebook.

The Russian ministry spokeswoman then added that such statements are “unworthy of a head of a European state’s diplomatic service … It is clear that [Boris Johnson] is poisoned with hatred and anger,” she said, also denouncing his words as “unprofessional” and “rude.”

It is “scary” that “this man is a representative of a nuclear power that bears a special responsibility for its actions in the international arena as well as for the preservation of international peace,” Zakharova said.

Now “it is beyond the shadow of a doubt that all London’s actions … were aimed at setting up a spectre of an enemy out of Russia, using any, even the most absurd reasons,” Zakharova said. She then added that British politicians are now apparently seeking to fully boycott the 2018 World Cup in Russia.

Earlier on Wednesday, Johnson once again blatantly accused Russia of being behind the poisoning of the former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, as he was being quizzed by the Commons foreign affairs committee. He also said he believes the comparison between the World Cup and the 1936 Olympics “is certainly right” just because the sporting event would somehow “glorify” Putin, from his point of view.

Skripal, 66, and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia have been in critical condition in hospital since March 4, when they were found unconscious on a bench outside a shopping center in Salisbury. The UK police later said that the two were poisoned by a nerve agent, which was called “Novichok.” No other tangible results of the investigation into this case have been made public yet.

However, this reality apparently did not stop London and its western allies from immediately putting all the blame for the incident on Russia. Last week, Prime Minister Theresa May confronted Moscow with an ultimatum to reveal the details of the alleged Skripal plot. Other Western countries expressed their “solidarity” with the UK on what they called the results of the British investigation, implying that Russia was culpable in this case.

Moscow repeatedly denied its involvement in the incident and called for an inclusive joint investigation, expressing its readiness to take part in it. It also rejected the British ultimatum. The UK then imposed sanctions on Moscow, which included expelling 23 diplomats, limiting diplomatic ties and freezing Russian state assets in the UK.

ICC Statement On The Philippines’ Notice Of Withdrawal

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Yesterday evening (19 March 2018) the International Criminal Court (“ICC” or “Court”) was officially notified by the United Nations that the Republic of the Philippines had on 17 March 2018 deposited a written notification of withdrawal from the Rome Statute, the Court’s founding treaty, with the United Nations Secretary-General as the depositary of the Statute. The Court regrets this development and encourages the Philippines to remain part of the ICC family.

Withdrawing from the Rome Statute is a sovereign decision, which is subject to the provisions of article 127 of that Statute.  A withdrawal becomes effective one year after the deposit of notice of withdrawal to the United Nations Secretary-General. A withdrawal has no impact on on-going proceedings or any matter which was already under consideration by the Court prior to the date on which the withdrawal became effective; nor on the status of any judge already serving at the Court.

As indicated recently in the ICC Pre-trial Chamber decision authorising the opening of an investigation in relation to the situation in Burundi, the ICC retains its jurisdiction over crimes committed during the time in which the State was party to the Statute and may exercise this jurisdiction over these crimes even after the withdrawal becomes effective.

The Court wishes to reaffirm that the participation of States in the Rome Statute and their continued support for the ICC in the discharge of its independent and impartial mandate is essential to global efforts to ensure accountability and strengthen the international rule of law.

The Rome Statute system, with the ICC at its centre, has judicially addressed and galvanised national and international efforts to address the most serious crimes under international law such as the use of child soldiers, sexual violence in conflict, torture, wilful killing and the destruction of cultural heritage.

The Court remains fully committed to its independent mandate to help end impunity in a complementary manner with States, and in so doing, contribute to the prevention of future atrocities. States’ participation in the Rome Statute ought not only be maintained and reinforced, but enlarged.

Background information on the Preliminary Examination of the situation in the Philippines

The Republic of the Philippines ratified the Rome Statute on 30 August 2011 and the Statute entered into force from 1 November 2011.

The preliminary examination of the situation in the Philippines was announced by the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC on 8 February 2018. It will analyse crimes allegedly committed in this State Party since at least 1 July 2016, in the context of the “war on drugs” campaign launched by the Government of the Philippines. Specifically, it has been alleged that since 1 July 2016, thousands of persons have been killed for reasons related to their alleged involvement in illegal drug use or dealing. While some of such killings have reportedly occurred in the context of clashes between or within gangs, it is alleged that many of the reported incidents involved extra-judicial killings in the course of police anti-drug operations.

A preliminary examination is not an investigation. It is an initial step to determine whether there is a reasonable basis to proceed with an investigation. Specifically, under article 53(1) of the Rome Statute, the Prosecutor, must consider issues of jurisdiction, admissibility and the interests of justice in making this determination.

Under the Rome Statute, national jurisdictions have the primary responsibility to investigate and prosecute those responsible for international crimes.

In conformity with the complementarity principle, which is a cornerstone of the Rome Statute legal system, and within the framework of each preliminary examination, the Office of the Prosecutor will engage with the national authorities concerned with a view to discussing and assessing any relevant investigation and prosecution at the national level.

In the independent and impartial exercise of its mandate, the Office of the Prosecutor will also give consideration to all submissions and views conveyed to it during the course of each preliminary examination, strictly guided by the requirements of the Rome Statute.

Should, at the conclusion of the preliminary examination process, the Prosecutor decide to proceed with an investigation, authorisation from a Pre-Trial Chamber of the Court would be required. The Court’s judges would then make an independent assessment as to whether the statutory criteria for the opening of an investigation are met.

Further information on this Preliminary examination is available, here.

 

Bangladesh To Compensate Survivors Of 2016 Café Attack

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By Kamran Reza Chowdhury

Bangladesh’s government will distribute financial compensation and mementos on Sunday to relatives of hostages killed in an attack at a Dhaka café in July 2016, the worst terrorist act in the nation’s history, home ministry officials said.

They said the families of 19 of the 20 hostages who were slain at the Holey Artisan Bakery were to receive 15,000 euros (1.5 million taka or U.S. $18,400) as compensation. The government contacted the families of all civilian victims of the overnight siege.

“The Honorable Home Minister will hand over the bank checks and crests [mementos] at the ceremony at the Rajarbagh police line auditorium,” Shamsur Rahman, an additional secretary of the home ministry, told BenarNews.

“The family members of one Japanese victim declined to take the financial honorarium,” Rahman said, adding that family members of three Bangladeshi victims and one Indian national would attend the ceremony.

“We have sent the financial honorarium to nine Italian and six Japanese victims through our embassies in Italy and Japan as they would not attend the ceremony.”

The Bangladeshi and Indian survivors plan to donate the money to a foundation created in memory of the victims of the attack, which took place on July 1-2, 2016, according to the home ministry.

“Hopefully I will attend. This is good news that the government has not forgotten the Holey Artisan café attack. We do not want to see any terrorist attacks. No parent should lose their children in this way,” a relative of a Bangladeshi victim told BenarNews on condition of anonymity.

Rahman said the government decided this was the proper way to honor the victims.

“You cannot compensate a death, so we call it a financial honorarium. The purpose of the ceremony is to give the message to the world that Bangladesh has not forgotten the Holey Artisan attack,” he said.

In an interview with BenarNews on the eve of the first anniversary of the café attack, Bangladeshi Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal described it as unprecedented.

“A massacre of this magnitude never happened in our country,” he said.

IS claimed responsibility

On the evening of July 1, 2016 – a Friday – five militants armed with AK-22 rifles, grenade and machetes, stormed the upscale café in Dhaka’s diplomatic zone, took diners hostages and killed 20 people – nine Italians, seven Japanese, one Indian and three Bangladeshis. In all, 29 people died including two police officers, two café workers and the militants.

The gunmen were linked to Neo-JMB, an offshoot of the militant group Jamaat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).

Unlike JMB, Neo-JMB is known to subscribe to Islamic State’s (IS) hardline ideology. Before commandos brought an end to the attack, IS media released photos of the attackers calling them IS “soldiers” and disclosing that they had killed 20 people inside the café.

Minister Khan and other government officials have since denied that IS has a presence in Bangladesh and attributed the attack to home-grown militants.

Ongoing investigation

Meanwhile, police have not finished their investigation into the attack, lead officer Humayun Kabir told BenarNews.

“This is very difficult to set a timeline for submitting the investigation report because some suspects remain at large,” Kabir said. “So, I cannot share findings of the report at this moment.”

Previously, Monirul Islam, chief of counter terrorism and transnational unit of police, told journalists that the report could be submitted to the court by the end of 2018.

Investigators have detected 22 suspects linked to the attack. Of those, 13 have been killed in encounters with the law enforcement agencies, six are in jail and three are fugitives.

One man, North South University professor Hasnat Karim, a Bangladesh-born British citizen, was identified as a suspect. He was the first to be taken into custody in connection with the terrorist siege. Officers alleged he was linked to the attack because he was able to leave.

Karim, who has proclaimed his innocence and said he was at the café with his wife and two daughters to celebrate a birthday on the night of the attack, has been in police custody since shortly after the siege was broken.

Israel Admits To Attacking Syrian Nuclear Reactor In 2007

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Israel’s military has officially admitted it bombed a suspected nuclear reactor in northeastern Syria in 2007.

In a statement on Wednesday, the army said Israeli warplanes struck the facility in Deir al-Zour desert on September 5-6 2007.

“The operation was carried out after complex intelligence efforts by dropping 17 tons of explosives using laser-guided bombs,” it said.

The Israeli army said that the suspected reactor “was close to being completed”.

Several Israeli media outlets published recordings and photographs of the Israeli attack on the Syrian facility.

According to Haaretz daily, the reactor was discovered by chance after five years of construction by the Syrians with the help of North Korea.

There was no comment from the Syrian regime on the Israeli admission.

Previously, Syria has denied that the bombed side was a nuclear reactor.

Last month, Israeli warplanes carried out airstrikes against Syrian and Iranian military targets in war-torn Syria.

Original article

Hunger Spreads In Turkmenistan – OpEd

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Despite its enormous oil and natural gas reserves, Turkmenistan has run out of money for food and basic services, leading to shortages in basic commodities, long lines, anger and frustration, and efforts by the regime to hide the situation by broadcasting staged events showing a surfeit of food.

Over the last few weeks the situation has only deteriorated from what it was at the end of February – see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/03/food-riots-in-turkmenistan-have-now.html – with ever higher prices not only for increasingly scare food but also for transportation and medical care (rosbalt.ru/world/2018/03/21/1689968.html).

Harvests across Central Asia were bad last year, but other countries in the region have covered their losses by purchases abroad either from state funds or by means of transfer payments by gastarbeiters working in Russia or elsewhere. So far, however, as Turkmenistan heads into spring, which is the worst time for food supplies in any country, the government has not acted.

And in contrast to the four other Central Asian states, Turkmenistan has few gastarbeiters abroad sending home money. Indeed, because of extremely high airfares and exist restrictions, Turkmens now cannot afford to go anywhere else. That was bad enough when the population was just poor. Now, it is hungry.

According to Regnum’s Irina Dzhorbenadze, the shortages of food and the inability of Turkmens to leave is creating a pressure cooker environment, one where unofficial estimates put real unemployment at 60 percent even as the government uses its media and diplomats to insist that “’there are no problems’” or only “’insignificant negative phenomena.’”

Making such claims may satisfy outsiders who rarely devote much attention to the most closed country in the former Soviet space, but a people who are hungry and insulted by their own government at the same time are candidates for revolts, however repressive the Ashgabat regime may be.

At the very least, between now and the first harvest in mid-summer, Turkmenistan is likely to become increasingly unstable, a candidate either for regime change or a descent into the kind of chaos that the most radical elements are certain to try to exploit.

Fictional Free Trade And Permanent Protectionism: Donald Trump’s Economic Orthodoxy – OpEd

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Let’s put it out there with suitable portions of provocation: free trade has never actually taken place.  There is an uncomfortable, skirmish-ridden middle ground, where states compete for primacy over surplus and deficits, where the notion of prosperity is language deferred, not to citizens, but corporations who are often backed for pursuing technological remits.

The debate about US President Donald Trump’s tariffs belies a fundamental point: the surrender of the state to non-elected entities which claim privileges over and above citizens and electors; the illusion that lifting citizens out of poverty demands an absence of government interference in favour of corporate industriousness.  What tends to happen, if anything, is a blurring.

Even as zeal filled free trade racketeers have insisted on its virtues, governments continue, in varying degrees, to corrupt and distort that the very trade they supposedly claim to be unshackled.  The news cycle here is key.

The short memories encouraged by that news cycle ignore the snarky engagement that characterised the opposition by three US airlines – American, United and Delta – to the $52 billion government subsidies received by Qatar Airways, Emirates and Etihad.  The logic here was simple and counter-intuitive to the free trade doctrinaire: by actually supplying such subsidies, the governments of the Gulf States were ensuring that their carriers could outperform their rivals.  This was state interference to the good, and woe to the US on that score.

While steel and aluminum have been romanticised in Trump’s policy drive, other metals have also fallen under the spell of tariffs.  Despite only supplying mere ripples through the media, Washington has been busily targeting Chinese producers of cast iron products.  One particular firm received a jaw-dropping 110 percent tariff.

Brussels, indignant by Washington’s recent moves, has also compiled a list of targeted US imports.  “Where action is necessary to safeguard the EU’s interests in such cases, the Commission may take appropriate commercial policy measures in response, on the basis of objective criteria.”  The European Commission has given a 10-day grace period for companies to express concern before the list is formally adopted.

All to the good – except that such conduct has simply garnered more publicity than other acts of trade hostility waged by the good offices of the EU in the name of trade security.  Over the years, European entities have been more than happy to target Chinese subsidized metals, a move featuring punitive tariffs.

In January this year, the EU imposed tariffs in the order of between 15 and 38 percent on Chinese cast iron products, adding to a considerable array of anti-dumping duties.  In August last year, the EU levied provisional tariffs of the eye popping order of 42.8 percent on selected cast iron products after the findings of an eight-month investigation.  Those, naturally, claimed that low prices affected the bloc’s producers.

In the words of the European Commission, “Prices of dumped imports from the People’s Republic of China significantly undercut Union industry prices during the investigation period with undercutting margins ranging from 35.4 percent to 42.7 percent leading to decreasing market shares and profits for the Union industry.”

Other examples populate the global trade system.  US regulators intend enforcing a 20 percent tariff on the first 1.2 million washers imported into the country in its first year, with a 50 percent surcharge on any machines above that number.

There are also tariffs that have found their way on solar panels, mostly of Chinese origin. In January, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer announced levels of up to 30 percent, citing the ample assistance provided by Chinese government subsidies.  On that score, both the EU and the US have been resoundingly dedicated, giving Beijing a certain moral high ground in claiming such measures to be anti-environmental.

The global trading system is characterised by the exchange of products that will, at some point, have found a sponsor, notably a government one.  In the religious utterings of the free market priest, this is to be avoided with plague-like concern.  In practice, finding products free of this taint is nigh impossible.

Reuben Abraham, CEO and senior fellow of the Mumbai-based IDFC Institute cites the iPhone as culprit-in-chief.  “Most of the technology inside an iPhone in some point in time or another has been funded by the US government… Lithium-ion batteries came out of research funded by the [Department of Energy].”  The same goes for click wheels, liquid crystal displays, microprocessors and micro hard drives.

No economist has made this point better than Mariana Mazzucato, whose The Entrepreneurial State dashes notions of a heaving, inefficient bureaucratic state left aside by the innovative genius of a private sector free of state encumbrances.  States, far from being enemies of innovation, can push it. Industries can be incubated and nurtured. Those not doing so risk mouldering.

Whether they be subsidies, overproduction, dumping, or tariffs, the world market is a set of scrappy untidy practices that put pay to the notion of trade free unbound.  Governments may well promote it, but the pragmatists are otherwise engaged in a different set of realities rooted in technology and considerations of protecting industry.

It took Trump, a bully-boy populist hell bent on opportunism and nostalgia, to make any discussion of tariffs heretical, when they has, in all truth, been a functional reality in the modern global political economy for decades. Protectionism, it can well be said, never left.

India: Muslims Welcome Move To Modernize Islamic Schools

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By Umar Manzoor Shah

Muslim groups in India have welcomed a federal government move to modernize traditional Islamic schools so they can do more than teach students Islam-centered subjects and languages.

Indian child rights groups recommend providing a broader curriculum at over 40,000 madrasas, the traditional Islamic schools that dot India’s villages and towns. An estimated 3.5 million children study at these.

“Subjects like modern science, history and mathematics should be introduced. There is a strong need for such a measure,” Mohammad Rajbalim, a Muslim leader in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, told ucanews.com.

The National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) recommended in early March that traditional Muslim schools should fall under the Right to Education Act. This would make it mandatory to provide free and compulsory education to children until the age of 14.

“A large number of Muslim children are being deprived of their right to education” as they only receive religious instruction, the commission said.

It expressed concern over the poor quality of education being offered at madrasas and said the children coming out of them are as well qualified as those with no proper schooling.

Muslim leaders agree that a curriculum which focuses on teaching children how to read and memorize the Quran and learn Islamic jurisprudence is not comprehensive enough to set them up for modern life.

The typical madrasa curriculum offers interpretations of the Quran, Islamic Sharia law, the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, and a subject known as mantic, or logic. They also offer Islamic history but tend to avoid any scandals and controversies.

Rajbalim said students who attend the madrasas live alien to mainstream society as they lack a modern education. He said they must learn about science, art and other subjects to survive in today’s competitive job market.

Most of India’s 172 million Muslims live as a “religious minority, backward in science education,” Aabid Ahmad, a research scholar in Islamic Studies from the University of Kashmir, told ucanews.com.

“Their participation in the scientific activity of the country is woefully low,” he added.

“This situation, if allowed to continue, would certainly hinder the progress of the community and the country. No community that is poorly educated can command respect.”

Moulana Javaid Ahmad, an Islamic scholar who runs a madrasa in central Kashmir, said modern science, mathematics, the arts and basic computer education could be integrated into the curriculum with positive effects.

“Religious subjects should be given top priority but a modern education cannot be ignored,” he said. “Muslim civil society must consider immediately reforming the curricula taught at most madrasas.”

Ahmad said he has been striving to incorporate this into his Muslim school but has failed to attract government assistance.

“The government sees madrasas and modern schools as two different things completely. But that doesn’t have to be the case. It’s possible to combine a religious and secular education,” he said.

Sayid Rasheed Ali, chairman of the Kerala Muslim Waqf Board, told ucanews.com the process of bringing madrasas into the modern age has already begun in the southern state. The general level of education in Kerala is considered among the best in India.

“There are various government-funded schemes through which modern subjects could be taught,” he said. “The idea should be to impart education in all subjects at these schools so the kids won’t get left behind.”

Sana Asma, a research scholar at Aligarh Muslim University in Uttar Pradesh, said the madrasas must be upgraded to meet the challenges of the modern world.

“A strong emphasis will need to be laid on the quality of education and expanding the base of science, information and technology, because these are highly competitive areas nowadays,” she said.

The madrasas have made an important contribution to society but the educational development of Muslims can’t be strategized without taking into account their service to the community, she added.

According to a census taken in 2011, 47 percent of Indian Muslims have no formal education, while 36.4 percent of Hindus are unschooled.

Hindus make up 80 percent, or 966 million, of India’s 1.2 billion people. This makes the 172-million strong Muslim community the largest religious minority in the country.

Indian Christians comprise 29 million people, or 2.3 percent of the population.


Director Of Vatican Communications Resigns Of ‘Lettergate’

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By Elise Harris

On Wednesday Pope Francis accepted the resignation of Msgr. Dario Edoardo Vigano as prefect of the Secretariat for Communications in wake of what has been dubbed by many as the ‘Lettergate’ scandal, which has dominated Catholic media the past week.

The announcement was made in a March 21 statement from Vatican spokesman Greg Burke, who said said Msgr. Lucio Adrián Ruiz, secretary of the Vatican communications office, will take charge until a new prefect is named.

In his letter submitting his resignation, which was dated March 19 and published March 21 alongside Francis’ response, Vigano said that in recent days, “many controversies have arisen regarding my work which, beyond intentions, destabilizes the complex and great task of reform which you entrusted to me.”

He thanked the Pope for his accompaniment and generosity, and said that for the sake of avoiding the “delay” of the reform and for “love of the Church,” he tendered his resignation.

In his letter of response, dated March 21, Francis said that after speaking with Vigano and after a “long and attentive reflection,” he accepted the prefect’s resignation.

He thanked Vigano for his service, and offered his blessing, asking that he stay on in the secretariat in a different, more advisory capacity.

The fiasco began last week after the Monday, March 12, launch of the 11-book series “The Theology of Pope Francis,” published by Libreria Editrice Vaticana, the Vatican publishing house overseen by the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communications.

A letter from Benedict XVI praising Francis’ theological and philosophical formation was read aloud at the event, however, the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communications later admitted to tampering with an image of the letter that was sent to media, blurring out lines in which Benedict said that he had not read the full series, and so could not give an in-depth analysis.

Days later another twist was added to the scandal when it was revealed that further paragraphs had been left out in which Benedict questioned the inclusion in the series of a theologian known for his “anti-papal initiatives.”

After receiving pressure from the media, the Secretariat for Communications published the full letter March 17, which they said was confidential and never intended to be published in its entirety.

Msgr. Vigano was tapped to head the secretariat for communications in 2015 with a mandate to reform and streamline the Vatican’s various communications entities. The recent scandal surrounding the letter has been likened by reporters to the first “Vatileaks” scandal in 2012, when Benedict XVI’s personal butler leaked some of his private letters to the press.

China Testing Artificial Intelligence-Equipped Unmanned Tanks

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China is testing unmanned tanks which could be equipped with artificial intelligence, a state-run newspaper said on Wednesday, March 21, as the country continues with its military modernization program, Reuters reports.

State television showed images this week of the unmanned tanks undergoing testing, the Global Times newspaper reported.

Footage showed a Type 59 tank being driven by remote control, in what the paper said was the first time a Chinese-made unmanned tank has been shown in a public forum.

The Type 59 tank is based on an old Soviet model first used in China in the 1950s and has been produced in large numbers and has a long service life, it said.

“A large number of due to retire Type 59 tanks can be converted into unmanned vehicles if equipped with artificial intelligence,” Liu Qingshan, the chief editor of Tank and Armoured Vehicle, told the newspaper.

Unmanned tanks will be able to work on other unmanned equipment, integrate information from satellites, aircraft or submarines, the report added.

China is in the middle of an impressive modernization program for its armed forces, including building stealth fighters and new aircraft carriers, as President Xi Jinping looks to assert the country’s growing power.

Faces That Changed How We Viewed Rap From Lagos To London – OpEd

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By Olurotimi Osha*

While hip-hop is now mainstream with a commercial global appeal, its history instantiates the classic elements of the dialectics of cultural and musical artistry. And many of its principal actors, who were once villains decades ago, are still on the stage, and now handsomely paid.

In 1992, the world of music changed and civility in the arts became pejorative, as the once unacceptable and inflammatory content of hard-core rap valorising misogynistic, homophobic, gangster and other bigoted themes were mainstreamed into music and pop culture. The style that ushered in the change was infectious and irresistible for the times. Even the “victims” of the musical assault were “bobbing” their heads.

Snoop’s unctuous mellow voice pelting “winnowy” lyrics in collaboration with Dr. Dre, was arguably responsible for mainstreaming the maestro’s The Chronic album, which soon became a global phenomenon. The laid-back and lanky Snoop was a natural. And why not, since music and “stardom” run in Snoop’s family, as he is cousins with not only his “posse” Nate Dogg, Daz, and RBX (who featured on The Chronic), but also superstars Brandy and Ray J – remember them?

Dre had always been the consummate hard-core/gangster rap producer. What changed with The Chronic? He introduced the 19-year-old 6 ft. 4, Snoop Doggy Dogg, who used The Chronic album as a “launch pad” for his own solo career.

The Chronic featured several “diss” tracks in which Dr. Dre and Snoop lyrically and graphically excoriated their artistic foes, including Dr. Dre’s once alter ego and NWA collaborator, Eazy E. Dr. Dre’s style and strategy in The Chronic was commercially successful, and the album peaked at number three on the Billboard 200. The single Nuthin but a ‘G’ Thang peaked at number two, on the Billboard Hot 100. The album’s production and commercial success earned it a spot at number 138 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Snoop Dogg’s distinctive style and inventive lyrics made him a superstar before he had even released a recording of his own, according to The New York Times. Their musical invective against Eazy-E was deemed “creatively offensive.” And then Eazy E came back with a track, Real muthafuckin G’s, which I had thought was a decent riposte. But my boys from Lagos to London weren’t feeling it…neither was the world’s new stage and base of hip hop fans.

While Eazy E had been the undisputed leader of NWA, Dr. Dre had taken over hip hop and it was clear, if you were going to have the global audience or be anything in rap, you had to be affiliated with Dre – either rapping with him or against him from the East Coast…until somebody else came along and made his mark with another formula in rap. In 1995, Eazy E died due to complications from HIV/AIDS.

Snoop’s global acceptance would be rewarded two years after his introduction on The Chronic, as he sat in jail, only to discover that his debut album Doggystyle had set worldwide records in the music industry on release, becoming the first album to debut at number one on Billboard. At the time of its release, Doggystyle also set the record as the fastest selling album of all time, with sales of almost one million copies in the first week.

Prior to Dr. Dre’s collaboration with Snoop, rappers had to whittle down their edginess for mainstream appeal and commercial success. However, Dre’s hard-core production was unapologetic and Snoop’s voice gave it a commercial and global appeal. The enterprising Puff Daddy would understand this appeal and replicate it with the smooth voice of Notorious B.I.G., to whom he served as hype-man and producer, on the East Coast.

Significantly, while the art appeared to glamorise crime, the artists invoked global awareness to the harsh conditions of Black Americans in urban cities in America. The art form drew the world’s attention, concern and empathy, while it kept them partying and “balling.”

I remember as international students in an MBA class, we were asked, who our favourite musicians/artists were back home: In unison, from India, China to Turkey everyone said, “Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac Shakur!”

Today, rap is not only global, but also mainstream. Faces that represented the gangsta-rap feuds of the nineties, and churned out hits that should have been forbidden, but became anthems, are among the most sought out celebrities in Hollywood. They are certainly the richest: Forbes 2018 billionaires edition, lists Jay-Z with a net-worth of $900 million, while his East Coast alter ego, Sean “Puffy” Combs has a net-worth of $810 million. P. Diddy’s former west coast nemesis, Dr. Dre was listed with a net-worth of $770 million. Together, the three maestros are the richest people of any genre in music. Not bad at all, for people whose music was once underground, restricted and stigmatised.

Perhaps, if Africa’s leaders could economically empower the now billion plus and counting people in sub-Saharan Africa, the likes of African musicians such as Davido and Wizkid would be hitting the billion-dollar mark in net-worth, too.

Rappers du jour are benefitting as mainstream artists from the revolutionary and innovative work the maestros (and many before them) put in decades ago. Dr. Dre, ever with his retinue of aficionados and talented posse, who often happen to be family (remember Warren G., his younger brother), has another family member sitting as king of hip-hop, in his little cousin, Kendrick Lamar. The multi-Grammy award winning rapper curated the score for the billion-dollar movie and black directed and black led cast, Black Panther. (The blockbuster movie, Black Panther crossed the billion-dollar threshold in its global sales on 9 March 2018, about 26 days after its release.)

On 7 April 2017 as Snoop took the stage to eulogise his late friend and collaborator, Tupac Shakur, into the rock and roll hall of fame, he looked remarkably the same even 25 years after he made his splash, as being “unapologetically gangsta.”

* Olurotimi Osha is a Doctor of Law candidate at the George Washington University Law School, in Washington, DC. He attended Columbia University in the City of New York.

Hunting Squid Slowed By Rising Carbon Levels

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Scientists have found that high carbon dioxide levels cause squid to bungle attacks on their prey.

PhD candidate Blake Spady from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at James Cook University (JCU) led the investigation. He said that the oceans absorb more than one-quarter of all the excess carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the atmosphere by humans and this uptake of additional CO2 causes seawater to become more acidic.

“Climate models project that unless there is a serious commitment to reducing emissions, CO2 levels will continue increasing this century to reach levels that will have far-reaching effects on sea life,” he said.

Mr Spady said the team chose to study cephalopods (a group that includes squid, cuttlefish and octopuses) because while most previous behavioural studies have focused on fishes, the effects of elevated CO2 on highly active invertebrates is largely unknown.

“Cephalopods also prey on just about anything they can wrap their arms around and are themselves preyed upon by a wide range of predator species, so they occupy an important place within marine food webs.”

The scientists tested the effects of elevated CO2 on the hunting behaviours of pygmy squid and bigfin reef squid.

“For pygmy squid, there was a 20% decrease in the proportion of squid that attacked their prey after exposure to elevated CO2 levels. They were also slower to attack, attacked from further away, and often chose more conspicuous body pattern displays at elevated CO2 conditions.

Bigfin reef squid showed no difference in the proportion of individuals that attacked prey, but, like the pygmy squid, they were slower to attack and used different body patterns more often.”

Mr Spady said both species showed increased activity at elevated CO2 conditions when they weren’t hunting, which suggests that they could also be adversely altering their ‘energy budgets’.

“Overall, we found similar behavioural effects of elevated v on two separate cephalopod orders that occupy largely distinct niches. This means a variety of cephalopods may be adversely affected by rising CO2 in the oceans, and that could have significant consequences in marine ecosystems,” said co-author Dr Sue-Ann Watson.

“However, because squid have short lifespans, large populations, and a high rate of population increase, they may have the potential to adapt to rapid changes in the physical environment,” Mr Spady added.

“The fast lifestyle of squid could mean they are more likely to adapt to future ocean conditions than some other marine species, and this is the next question we intend to investigate.”

Wind, Sea Ice Patterns Point To Climate Change In Western Arctic

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A major shift in western Arctic wind patterns occurred throughout the winter of 2017 and the resulting changes in sea ice movement are possible indicators of a changing climate, says Kent Moore, a professor of physics at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Thanks to data collected by buoys dropped from aircraft onto the Arctic Ocean’s sea ice, Moore and colleagues at the University of Washington, where he spent the year as the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Arctic Studies, were able to observe this marked, anomalous shift in Arctic wind patterns and sea ice movement during the winter of 2017.

Their study is published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Usually, the western Arctic has relatively stable weather during the winter; it is home to a quasi-stationary region of high pressure known as the Beaufort High, which promotes “anti-cyclonic” winds that travel in a clockwise direction and move sea ice along with it. By contrast, the eastern Arctic has a more dynamic climate where cyclones are a common winter phenomenon with storms moving from Greenland towards Norway and the Barents Sea.

“Last year, we looked at the buoy tracks in the western Arctic and saw that the sea ice was moving in a counter-clockwise pattern instead and wondered why,” Moore said. “We discovered that storms were moving in an unexpected direction from the Barents Sea along the Siberian coast and into the western Arctic, bringing with them low-pressures that caused the collapse of the Beaufort High.”

Moore and colleagues believe that the low-pressure systems were able to make inroads into the western Arctic because of an unusually warm fall in 2016 resulting in thinner and less extensive sea ice. During the winter, this allowed for more oceanic heat to be transferred to the atmosphere and provided an additional energy source for these storms.

“As a result of this additional energy source, the storms did not dissipate over the Barents Sea, as is usual, and were able to reach into the western Arctic,” Moore said. “We reviewed more than 60 years of weather data from the Arctic and it appears that this collapse has never happened before.”

Generally, the Beaufort High drives sea ice motion throughout the Arctic as well as impacting ocean circulation over the North Atlantic Ocean. Any shift in movement patterns has the potential to affect the climate in these regions, as well as the Arctic ecosystem that depends on predictable areas of open water and ice.

For example, as a result of this collapse, sea ice was thinner along the coast of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, as well as in the southern Beaufort Sea last winter. Such changes can disturb Arctic food webs, stressing marine mammals and polar bears, especially if they are ongoing.

“If this becomes part of the normal pattern – even if it happens every few years – it will mean that the climate is changing,” Moore said. “We are still exploring all of the specific impacts.”

Glacier Mass Loss: Past Point Of No Return

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In the “Paris Agreement”, 195 member states of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change have agreed to limit the rise in global average temperature to significantly below 2°C, if possible to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. This should significantly reduce the risks of climate change.

What does this plan – if successful – mean for the evolution of glaciers? Climate researchers Ben Marzeion and Nicolas Champollion from the Institute of Geography at the University of Bremen and Georg Kaser and Fabien Maussion from the Institute of Atmospheric and Cryospheric Sciences at the University of Innsbruck have investigated this question by calculating the effects of compliance with these climate goals on the progressive melting of glaciers.

“Melting glaciers have a huge influence on the development of sea level rise. In our calculations, we took into account all glaciers worldwide – without the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and peripheral glaciers – and modelled them in various climate scenarios,” said Georg Kaser.

One kilogram of CO2 emitted costs 15 kilograms of glacier ice.

Whether the average temperature rises by 2 or only 1.5°C makes no significant difference for the development of glacier mass loss over the next 100 years. “Around 36 percent of the ice still stored in glaciers today would melt even without further emissions of greenhouse gases. That means: more than a third of the glacier ice that still exists today in mountain glaciers can no longer be saved even with the most ambitious measures,” said Ben Marzeion.

However, looking beyond the current century, it does make a difference whether the 2 or 1.5°C goal is achieved. “Glaciers react slowly to climatic changes. If, for example, we wanted to preserve the current volume of glacial ice, we would have to reach a temperature level from pre-industrial times, which is obviously not possible. In the past, greenhouse gas emissions have already triggered changes that can no longer be stopped. This also means that our current behaviour has an impact on the long-term evolution of the glaciers – we should be aware of this,” added glaciologist Kaser.

In order to make these effects tangible, the scientists have calculated that every kilogram of CO2 that we emit today will cause 15 kilograms of glacier melt in the long term. Calculated on the basis of an average car newly registered in Germany in 2016, this means that one kilogram of glacier ice is lost every five hundred meters by car,” said Ben Marzeion.

Brewing Hoppy Beer Without The Hops

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Hoppy beer is all the rage among craft brewers and beer lovers, and now UC Berkeley biologists have come up with a way to create these unique flavors and aromas without using hops.

The researchers created strains of brewer’s yeast that not only ferment the beer but also provide two of the prominent flavor notes provided by hops. In double-blind taste tests, employees of Lagunitas Brewing Company in Petaluma, California, characterized beer made from the engineered strains as more hoppy than a control beer made with regular yeast and Cascade hops.

Bryan Donaldson, innovations manager at Lagunitas, detected notes of “fruit-loops” and “orange blossom” with no off flavors.

Why would brewers want to use yeast instead of hops to impart flavor and aroma? According to Charles Denby, one of two first authors of a paper appearing this week in the journal Nature Communications, growing hops uses lots of water, not to mention fertilizer and energy to transport the crop, all of which could be avoided by using yeast to make a hop-forward brew. A pint of craft beer can require 50 pints of water merely to grow the hops, which are the dried flowers of a climbing plant.

“My hope is that if we can use the technology to make great beer that is produced with a more sustainable process, people will embrace that,” Denby said.

Hops’ flavorful components, or essential oils, are also highly variable from year to year and plot to plot, so using a standardized yeast would allow uniformity of flavor. And hops are expensive.

A former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow, Denby has launched a startup called Berkeley Brewing Science with Rachel Li, the second first author and a UC Berkeley doctoral candidate. They hope to market hoppy yeasts to brewers, including strains that contain more of the natural hop flavor components, and create other strains that incorporate novel plant flavors not typical of beer brewed from the canonical ingredients: water, barley, hops and yeast.

Using DNA scissors

The engineered yeast strains were altered using CRISPR-Cas9, a simple and inexpensive gene-editing tool invented at UC Berkeley. Denby and Li inserted four new genes plus the promoters that regulate the genes into industrial brewer’s yeast. Two of the genes – linalool synthase and geraniol synthase – code for enzymes that produce flavor components common to many plants. In this instance, the genes came from mint and basil, respectively. Genes from other plants that were reported to have linalool synthase activity, such as olive and strawberry, were not as easy to work with.

The two other genes were from yeast and boosted the production of precursor molecules needed to make linalool and geraniol, the hoppy flavor components. All of the genetic components – the Cas9 gene, four yeast, mint and basil genes and promoters – were inserted into yeast on a tiny circular DNA plasmid. The yeast cells then translated the Cas9 gene into the Cas9 proteins, which cut the yeast DNA at specific points. Yeast repair enzymes then spliced in the four genes plus promoters.

The researchers used a specially designed software program to get just the right mix of promoters to produce linalool and geraniol in proportions similar to the proportions in commercial beers produced by Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, which operates a tap room not far from the startup.

They then asked Charles Bamforth, a malting and brewing authority at UC Davis, to brew a beer from three of the most promising strains, using hops only in the initial stage of brewing – the wort – to get the bitterness without the hoppy flavor. Hop flavor was supplied only by the new yeast strains. Bamforth also brewed a beer with standard yeast and hops, and asked a former student, Lagunitas’s Donaldson, to conduct a blind comparison taste test with 27 brewery employees.

“This was one of our very first sensory tests, so being rated as hoppier than the two beers that were actually dry-hopped at conventional hopping rates was very encouraging,” Li said.

From sustainable fuels to sustainable beer

Denby came to UC Berkeley to work on sustainable transportation fuels with Jay Keasling, a pioneer in the field of synthetic biology and a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. The strategy developed by Keasling is to make microbes, primarily bacteria and yeast, ramp up their production of complex molecules called terpenes, and then insert genes that turn these terpenes into commercial products. These microbes can make such chemicals as the antimalarial drug, artemisinin, fuels such as butanol, and aromas and flavors used in the cosmetic industry.

But the brewing project “found me,” Denby said

“I started home brewing out of curiosity with a group of friends while I was starting out in Jay’s lab, in part because I enjoy beer and in part because I was interested in fermentation processes,” he said. “I found out that the molecules that give hops their hoppy flavor are terpene molecules, and it wouldn’t be too big of a stretch to think we could develop strains that make terpenes at the same concentrations that you get when you make beer and add hops to them.”

The final hook was that a hoppy strain of yeast would make the brewing process more sustainable than using agriculturally produced hops, which is a very natural resource-intensive product, he said.

“We started our work on engineering microbes to produce isoprenoids – like flavors, fragrances and artemisinin – about 20 years ago,” said Keasling. “At the same time, we were building tools to accurately control metabolism. With this project, we are able to use some of the tools others and we developed to accurately control metabolism to produce just the right amount of hops flavors for beer.”

Denby and Li first had to overcome some hurdles, such as learning how to genetically engineer commercial brewer’s yeast. Unlike the yeast used in research labs, which have one set of chromosomes, brewer’s yeast has four sets of chromosomes. They found out that they needed to add the same four genes plus promoters to each set of chromosomes to obtain a stable strain of yeast; if not, as the yeast propagated they lost the added genes.

They also had to find out, through computational analytics performed by Zak Costello, which promoters would produce the amounts of linalool and geraniol at the right times to approximate the concentrations in a hoppy beer, and then scale up fermentation by a factor of about 100 from test tube quantities to 40-liter kettles.

In the end, they were able to drink their research project, and continue to do so at their startup as they ferment batches of beer to test new strains of yeast.

“Charles and Rachel have shown that using the appropriate tools to control production of these flavors can result in a beer with a more consistent hoppy flavor, even better than what nature can do itself,” Keasling said.


Obesity Dulls The Sense Of Taste

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Previous studies have indicated that weight gain can reduce one’s sensitivity to the taste of food, and that this effect can be reversed when the weight is lost again, but it’s been unclear as to how this phenomenon arises.

Now a study in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Andrew Kaufman, Robin Dando, and colleagues at Cornell University shows that inflammation, driven by obesity, actually reduces the number of taste buds on the tongues of mice.

A taste bud comprises of approximately 50 to 100 cells of three major types, each with different roles in sensing the five primary tastes (salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami). Taste bud cells turn over quickly, with an average lifespan of just 10 days.

To explore changes in taste buds in obesity, the authors fed mice either a normal diet made up of 14% fat, or an obesogenic diet containing 58% fat. Perhaps unsurprisingly, after 8 weeks, the mice fed the obesogenic diet weigh about one-third more than those receiving normal chow. But strikingly, the obese mice had about 25% fewer taste buds than the lean mice, with no change in the average size or the distribution of the three cell types within individual buds.

The turnover of taste bud cells normally arises from a balanced combination of programmed cell death (a process known as apoptosis) and generation of new cells from special progenitor cells. However, the researchers observed that the rate of apoptosis increased in obese mice, whereas the number of taste bud progenitor cells in the tongue declined, likely explaining the net decline in the number of taste buds. Mice that were genetically resistant to becoming obese did not show these effects, even when fed a high-fat diet, implying that they are due not to the consumption of fat per se, but rather the accumulation of fatty tissue (adipose).

Obesity is known to be associated with a chronic state of low-grade inflammation, and adipose tissue produces pro-inflammatory cytokines – molecules that serve as signals between cells – including one called TNF-alpha.

The authors found that the high-fat diet increased the level of TNF-alpha surrounding the taste buds; however mice that were genetically incapable of making TNF-alpha had no reduction in taste buds, despite gaining weight. Conversely, injecting TNF-alpha directly into the tongue of lean mice led to a reduction in taste buds, despite the low level of body fat.

“These data together suggest that gross adiposity stemming from chronic exposure to a high-fat diet is associated with a low-grade inflammatory response causing a disruption in the balancing mechanisms of taste bud maintenance and renewal,” Dando said. “These results may point to novel therapeutic strategies for alleviating taste dysfunction in obese populations.”

Drought-Induced Changes In Forest Composition Amplify Effects Of Climate Cchange

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The face of American forests is changing, thanks to climate change-induced shifts in rainfall and temperature that are causing shifts in the abundance of numerous tree species, according to a new paper by University of Florida researchers.

The result means some forests in the eastern U.S. are already starting to look different, but more important, it means the ability of those forests to soak up carbon is being altered as well, which could in turn bring about further climate change.

“Although climate change has been less dramatic in the eastern U.S. compared to some other regions, such as Alaska and the southwestern U.S., we were interested to see if there were signals in forest inventory data that might indicate climate-induced changes in eastern U.S. forests,” said Jeremy Lichstein, senior author and a UF assistant professor of biology. “The changes we documented are easily masked by other disturbances, which is probably why no one had previously documented them. Without a long-term dataset with millions of trees, we probably could not have detected these changes.”

The study appears in the journal Nature.

Lichstein and his team based their findings on systematic forest inventories of trees in the eastern U.S. from the 1980s to the 2000s. The team looked specifically at forest biomass, tree species composition, and climate variability. The researchers found that decades of changes in water deficit have reduced forest biomass, causing an influx of trees that are more tolerant to drought but slower growing. This shift results in significant changes in forest species composition with their accompanying ecological effects and, moreover, affects the capacity of forest biomass (the mass of living trees) to store carbon. Healthy forests play a key role in global ecosystems as they contain much of the terrestrial biodiversity on the planet and act as a net sink for capturing atmospheric carbon. As climate change affects the forests, so do the forests affect climate change.

Water stress can be caused by rising temperatures, decreases in rainfall, or a combination of the two. To study changes in soil moisture, the researchers used the Palmer drought severity index to examine average water availability and loss over the study period.

Forests are affected by other human activities such as farming or logging, and many are in a stage of ecological succession with lower biomass compared to mature forests. This history of disturbance made the researchers’ analysis challenging. To solve this, researchers compared forests on the basis of their age. “We compared forests in the 1980s of a given age (for example, an 80-year-old forest) to forests of the same age in the 2000s,” Lichstein said. “In areas where the climate got wetter, our analysis showed increases in biomass over the two decades, whereas in the areas that got drier, there were decreases in biomass. When we look at the eastern U.S. as a whole, there was an overall trend towards a drier climate from the 1980s to the 2000s, and therefore the overall effect of climate over the two decades was to reduce forest biomass.”

Drought-tolerant tree species tend to allocate more carbon to fine roots and less to their leaves and woody parts that would sequester more carbon. Lichstein said that although they expected an increase in drought-tolerant tree abundance would prevent biomass losses triggered by water deficits, the opposite appears to be true. “Functional shifts amplified the effects of climate by making forest biomass more responsive to drying or wetting,” he said. “In hindsight, this makes sense, because drought-tolerant species tend to be slow growing. So, if drought causes a shift towards more drought-tolerant species, biomass will decline compared to forests dominated by fast-growing, drought-intolerant species.”

Overall, the study shows that forest biomass and tree species composition and their combined impact on carbon storage are affected by climatic variability on a sensitive and short timeline — just a few decades. “It is premature to say whether or not the amplification effect that we documented is a widespread phenomenon,” Lichstein said. “We hope that our findings will stimulate further research into relationships between species composition, ecosystem function, and climate variability.”

European Commission Greenlights Bayer-Monsanto Merger

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(EurActiv) — The European Commission approved on Wednesday (21 March) the proposed blockbuster buyout of US agri-giant Monsanto by German chemical firm Bayer, after securing concessions from Bayer in order to win approval.

“We have approved Bayer’s plans to take over Monsanto because the parties’ remedies, worth well over 6 billion euros ($7.4 billion), meet our competition concerns in full,” said Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s antitrust chief.

Brussels launched an in-depth investigation last August into the $66 billion (€56 billion) deal, which would create the world’s largest integrated pesticides and seeds company but has raised alarm among activists.

The Commission, which serves as the powerful anti-trust regulator for the 28-nation European Union, at the time, cited concerns the deal could reduce competition in key products for farmers.

Brussels made the decision despite opposition by environmentalists who fear that the deal gives too much power to the world’s leading manufacturers of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the controversial weedkiller glyphosate.

The tie-up has already won approval by Chinese authorities, but still awaits the crucial approval by US regulators, who have voiced concerns.

The EU has won several concessions from Bayer including the announced sale in October of parts of Bayer’s agrochemical business to German rival BASF.

That deal would see Bayer sell the lion’s share of its crop seeds units and its glyphosate herbicide business to BASF for €5.9 billion ($7 billion).

Earlier this month, BASF also committed to buying Bayer’s vegetable seed business in a last-minute concession to Brussels.

Bayer chief executive Werner Baumann said last month that if it receives the Commission’s go-ahead, the Monsanto deal could be completed sometime in the second quarter.

In a letter to Commissioner Vestager, activists from Friends of Europe warned against the merger due to its consequences for the environment.

“Blocking this deeply unpopular merger would be a big win for the EU — over a million citizens have called on EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager to block this merger from hell,” the activists said in a statement.

The EU acknowledged the opposition but insisted that it could “assess the merger solely from a competition perspective.”

“This assessment must be impartial and is subject to the scrutiny of the European Courts,” it added. Bayer’s takeover is the latest in a wave of consolidation in the competitive and politically sensitive agrochemicals sector.

China’s state-owned ChemChina has completed its $43 billion takeover of Switzerland’s Syngenta, and the nearly $150 billion tie-up of US giants Dow Chemical and DuPont has also been completed.

Adrian Bebb, food and farming campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe, commented, “This merger will create the world’s biggest and most powerful agribusiness corporation, which will try to force its genetically modified seeds and toxic pesticides into our food and countryside”.

“The Commission decision also allows them, together with BASF, to become data giants in agriculture – the ‘Facebooks of farming’ – with all the pitfalls that entails. The coming together of these two is a marriage made in hell – bad for farmers, bad for consumers and bad for our countryside,” he added.

Trump, Terrorism And The Politics Of Witch Hunts – OpEd

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By John Feffer*

Five hundred years ago, a popular test to flush out witches was called “ordeal by water.” Dunk an alleged witch into a lake. If she sinks, she’s innocent. If she floats, her guilt is plain for all to see and she can be safely burned at the stake.

By this ancient form of waterboarding, witch hunters thought that they could identify the emissaries of the devil. The objects of suspicion were usually people living on the margins of society – spinsters, practitioners of herbalism, Roma, former slaves, Native Americans. It was a convenient way of cleansing communities of the unconventional.

Today’s witch hunters have different prey in mind. They are anxious to flush out terrorists, also purportedly the emissaries of the devil, also bent on upending the status quo, and also often on the margins of society.

The modern “ordeal by water” — the waterboarding that U.S. investigators infamously used in the aftermath of September 11 — is meant to force them to confess not only to their own supposed crimes, but also to the nefarious activities of the hidden network to which they belong.

Given this history, it’s odd that the most powerful person in the world has alleged that he is the subject of a witch hunt.

President Donald Trump tweeted this week about the investigation of Russiagate by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller: “A total WITCH HUNT with massive conflicts of interest!” he called it.

It’s not the first time that Trump has used “witch hunt” in self-defense. It’s not even the first time that he’s capitalized the expression. But in his recent tweet storm, the president went after Mueller by name, which seemed an ominous escalation.

It’s also curious that Trump is talking about witch hunts just after nominating Gina Haspel to head up the CIA. Haspel famously ran a CIA black site in Thailand where she oversaw the waterboarding of suspects and then urged the shredding of evidence of the use of this technique.

So, as Trump proclaims “witch hunt” in bold letters, he’s pushing an authentic, modern-day witch-hunter to one of the very top positions in his administration. The fact that the president has supported the return of waterboarding because he wants to “fight fire with fire” only underscores the dangerous nature of the nomination.

It is but the latest example of Trump grabbing the grenades thrown at him and lobbing them back in the direction of his opponents. Accused of “massive conflicts of interest,” Trump tries to pin the same label on Mueller and the FBI. Derided as one the stupidest men to ever occupy the White House, Trump loves to declare his opponents “low intelligence.”

And the man who cries “witch hunt” is resurrecting an industrial-strength witch hunt of his own.

Trump’s Terrifying Counter-Terrorism

As a candidate, Trump spoke of terrorism as if it were a huge wave about to engulf the United States and the world. He promised to fight “Radical Islam” with “military, cyber, and financial warfare” alongside an ideological campaign. There’d be a new immigration policy. There’d be beefed up law enforcement. It would all represent a radical break from the policies of the Obama administration and what Hillary Clinton had to offer.

As president, however, Trump has largely followed the approach of his predecessor. As Joshua Geltzer and Stephen Tankel explain in The Atlantic:

Under Trump, the conduct of actual counterterrorism appears largely consistent with that of Barack Obama’s two terms and George W. Bush’s second term. Those common elements include working with partners wherever possible, beefing up intelligence cooperation, relying on distinctive U.S. capabilities, including armed drones, and utilizing the criminal justice system to prosecute those arrested in the United States on suspicion of terrorist activities. 

Of course, Trump has also introduced some new twists of his own that suggest that he has an animus toward Muslims in general, is indifferent to the suffering of innocent Muslim victims of U.S. air wars, and couldn’t care less about how U.S. allies crack down on their own Muslim populations.

Thus, Trump’s attempted Muslim travel ban managed to piss off all of the “moderate Muslims” that he talked so much of partnering with against “Radical Islam.” The ever-closer partnership with Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen, its blockade of Qatar, and its gathering conflict with Iran all suggest that Trump is taking sides in the complicated political and confessional struggles in the Middle East. Civilian casualties skyrocketed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria under Trump — and those victims have largely been Muslim. And his buddy-buddy relations with dictators in the Arab world, like Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, reinforce the belief among many Muslims that the United States doesn’t care about their human rights.

At the same time, Trump has proudly kept open the U.S. facility at Guantanamo, a symbol for many around the world of U.S. enhanced interrogation techniques. And UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer argues that torture is still going on there. Mike Pompeo, about to transition from head of the CIA to secretary of state, has defended the use of waterboarding, criticized the Obama administration for closing “black sites,” and is willing to revisit the question of interrogation techniques even after a bipartisan effort removed torture from the toolbox.

It took some time before the torture and black sites of the Bush administration came to light. How long will it take before the real counter-terrorism policies of the Trump administration are exposed?

The Other Investigation

Let’s turn now from the real news to the fake news.

Donald Trump has declared that Russiagate is a witch hunt. His use of the phrase suggests three things:

  • It’s an investigation into nothing since witches don’t exist.
  • It’s a campaign against someone with unpopular views.
  • It’s an example of mass hysteria.

Let’s examine the evidence. In the first case, well, the “witches” do exist. A number of members of the coven to which Donald Trump belongs have already admitted to practicing black magic.

Indictments have been handed down to former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, former campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, and former deputy campaign manager Rick Gates. Flynn lied to investigators and stood liable for much greater penalties for his unregistered foreign lobbying. George Papadopoulos also lied about his foreign contacts. Manafort and Gates were involved in multi-million dollar financial crimes.

All four had substantial dealings with Russian contacts. Manafort had a plan to influence the U.S. elections in Russia’s favor all the way back in 2005 and brought all of his contacts with oligarchs and Russian officials into the Trump campaign when he signed up on March 29, 2016. Papadopoulos worked on establishing a back channel with Moscow for the campaign and revealed for the first time, to an Australian diplomat, that Russia had Democratic Party emails that could help Trump. Flynn, who talked with Russian officials during the campaign, was on the lookout for ways to monetize his new status.

“None of the charges, so far, directly address whether the Trump campaign knowingly colluded with the Russians, or whether the President himself obstructed justice,” writes Amy Davidson Sorkin in The New Yorker. “The list of people who are cooperating, however, suggests that Mueller may be getting close on both points.”

Then there’s that other coven of witches on the other side of the world. Mueller has handed down indictments for 13 Russians for attempting to subvert the 2016 elections in Trump’s favor. The indictment notes that this Russian involvement began in 2014, which coincides with when Dutch intelligence informed U.S. officials that it had evidence of Russian hacking into Democratic Party computers (which the officials inexplicably ignored). The indictments reveal a disturbing pattern of identity theft, Internet trolling, and the organization of pro-Trump rallies.

Did the two covens conspire? They talked. They certainly met on several occasions. They offered the promise of useful cooperation. Criminal conspiracy beyond the election — in the form of money laundering — is also a possibility. Mueller has not come to the end of the investigation.

In the meantime, however, let’s dispense with the notion that those pursuing the truth of the Russiagate scandals are engaging in a witch hunt comparable to the search for Communists under every bed during the McCarthy era.

Those who have been indicted committed actionable offenses (not ideological ones). Those who are associated with Trump and haven’t been indicted are on no black list that prevents them from working (campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, for example, was at Harvard this fall). And those who challenge the Russiagate narrative have not been cast to the margins: They can be heard every day on the wildly popular Fox News. These are not marginal people with unpopular views forced to work under pseudonyms to scrape by.

Finally, is Russiagate an example of mass hysteria? Certainly the media has engaged in a feeding frenzy. But that’s to be expected for a news story involving the president, a foreign power, money, and intrigue. Certainly the Democrats are trying to make political hay out of the scandal. They’d be stupid not to, though Russiagate has not figured prominently in recent Democratic victories in Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Otherwise, Russiagate hasn’t produced a set of investigations at all levels of American society a la the Red Scare of the 1950s. Mueller has been rather narrow in its focus on Trump and his team, and the investigation has been quite sober in its rhetoric.

So far, Mueller has yet to talk to Trump himself. If the president doesn’t ultimately refuse, expect a rather respectful colloquy punctuated by some pointed questions.

Ah, but wouldn’t it be poetic justice if Mueller were authorized to subject the president to a real ordeal by water? Let’s see how Trump reacts to the waterboarding that he so cavalierly wishes upon others.

That would be a true, Trumpian example of fighting fire with fire.

*John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of dystopian novel Splinterlands.

Managing Fisheries In Troubled Waters: Can An SCS Body Work? – Analysis

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Notwithstanding all the potential benefits, the setting up of a Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (RFMO) will not be a panacea to the fisheries problems in the South China Sea.

By Zhang Hongzhou*

There is a view in some circles that the best approach for managing the disputes in the South China Sea is for the claimant parties to set aside the sovereignty disputes to focus on joint development and management of the natural resources. Previous attempts to push forward this approach have focused mostly on joint development of the hydrocarbon resources. However, these attempts have been fraught with difficulty.

In contrast, joint development and management of fishery resources is considered a “better vehicle” for fostering cooperation on both bilateral and regional levels in the South China Sea. On the one hand, fisheries are seen as a more “neutral” area which is capable of stimulating co-operation. On the other hand, fishery conflicts and disputes have been on the rise in the South China Sea.

Trend in Fishery Issues

The absence of a regional governing body or a multilateral agreement to govern fishery issues is considered one of the key contributors to increasing overfishing, IUU fishing, and fishing conflicts in the South China Sea. While lawmakers elsewhere have erected an elaborate network of innovative accords and conservation instruments to manage fish stocks around the world, there is no regional fisheries management organisation (RFMO) that deals with fishery issues in the South China Sea.

Under such circumstances, the establishment of an RFMO in the South China Sea is considered imperative for managing fishery issues. Cooperation through RFMO could reduce the likelihood of states becoming involved in fisheries disputes. The collaborative agreements may also help to abate disputes, particularly territorial disputes among the states in the sea region.

Regional Fisheries Body a Panacea?

Notwithstanding all the potential benefits, the setting up of an RFMO will not be a panacea. A presumption of establishing an RFMO in the South China Sea is that such a regional fisheries body is an effective means of regulating IUU fishing and controlling overfishing. Empirical evidence, however, suggests that an RFMO has a variety of problems, including poor data provision, failure to adopt appropriate conservation measures, and inadequate compliance with management measures.

Given the consensus-based decision-making mechanism in the region, particularly the ASEAN way of diplomacy, regional treaties tend to be negotiated, implemented, and revised according to the rule of consensus. Consequently, regional instruments keep their provisions vague and ambiguous.

The consensus approach can impel “each negotiating body to search for the lowest common denominator” and complicate negotiations; a single nation can resist the development of a common position and demand concessions for the price of achieving consensus. As a result, the design of a regional agreement for implementation would take years, sometimes decades.

This is clearly evidenced by the disappointing content of the ASEAN-initiated Declaration of Conduct (DOC) and prolonged discussion of the related Code of Conduct (COC). The delays inherent in the negotiation and ratification process of regional agreements to protect South China Sea fishery become especially important concerning the rapid rate of technological change within fishing industry.

The Question of Uncertainty

Furthermore, political compromises tend to weaken an RMFO’s ability to control fishing intensity. One way an RMFO can operate is by determining total allowable catch (TAC) for fishery resources in a particular area. This is aimed to stabilise fish stocks to ensure that the current harvest does not trade off future productivity.

Unfortunately, the imposing of TAC limits is subject to a considerable uncertainty. Biologists, ecologists, marine biologists, and other scientists cannot confidently determine when stocks are endangered prior to the destruction of fish stocks. Therefore, the TAC limits are often set with strong political, economic, and social considerations.

Even in Europe, scientists came under pressure to overestimate quotas when interpreting the unpredictability of fish populations to establish a TAC system. In addition, the effectiveness of the RFMO is dependent on the fishery governance capacity of the region.

The sheer size of the South China Sea and magnitude of the fishing industry (based on the number of fishing vessels and fishermen) pose challenges to the establishment of control. According to the Fisheries Management Index that measures a state’s fishery governance capacity, all South China Sea countries ranked near the bottom for their standard of research, management, enforcement, socioeconomics, and stock status.

Political Complications

Apart from an RFMO’s inability to meet the current and future food security and economic development needs of the regional countries and its difficulties in dealing with overcapacity (excess fishing fleet and fishermen), other factors make it an extremely politically daunting task to reach such an agreement. One is the complications in defining the precise boundary of the water areas to be governed by the RFMO. Another is the problematic issue of Taiwan.

Taiwan is not only a significant global fishing power that possesses one of the largest global fishing fleets; it is also a key claimant party in the South China Sea disputes. It is therefore critical to include Taiwan in the management decisions. This is to ensure that Taiwan complies with fishing regulations adopted by the RFMO.

By virtue of its unique political status, however, incorporating Taiwan has its difficulties. In the context of strained cross-strait ties since Tsai Ing-wen took office, in addition to China’s longstanding unyielding stance towards Taiwan’s role in the South China Sea negotiations, it will be impossible for China to allow Taiwan to participate in the RFMO as a full member.

Currently, some RFMOs creatively adopted the concept of “fishing entity” to incorporate Taiwan. In the context of the South China Sea, China is not likely to allow Taiwan to participate in RFMOs through the concept of a “fishing entity”. It is equally very doubtful that the Tsai Ing-wen administration will participate in the RMFO as a “fishing entity”, under the name of Chinese Taipei (or China Taipei).

*Zhang Hongzhou is Research Fellow at the China Programme, Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. A longer version was published by Marine Policy.

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