America has had its share of crooks (Warren G. Harding, Richard Nixon), bigots (Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan), and incompetents (Andrew Johnson, George W. Bush). But never before Donald Trump have we had a president who combined all these nefarious qualities.
America’s great good fortune was to begin with the opposite – a superb moral leader. By June of 1775, when congress appointed George Washington to command the nation’s army, he had already “become a moral rallying post,” as his biographer, Douglas Southall Freeman, described him. He was,“the embodiment of the purpose, the patience, and the determination necessary for the triumph of the revolutionary cause.”
Washington won the war and then led the fledgling nation “by directness, by deference, and by manifest dedication to duty.”
A president’s most fundamental legal and moral responsibility is to uphold and protect our system of government. Donald Trump has degraded that system.
When he threatens to loosen federal libel laws so he can sue news organizations that are critical of him and revoke licenses of networks critical of him, he isn’t just bullying the media. He’s threatening the constitutionally guaranteed freedom and integrity of the press.
When he equated Neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members with counter-demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, by blaming “both sides” for the violence, he wasn’t being neutral. He was condoning white supremacists, thereby undermining the constitution’s guarantee of equal rights.
When he pardoned Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, for a criminal contempt conviction, he wasn’t just signaling it’s okay for the police to engage in violations of civil rights. He was also subverting the rule of law by impairing the judiciary’s power to force public officials to abide by court decisions.
When he criticized NFL players for kneeling during the national anthem, he wasn’t just demanding they demonstrate their patriotism. He was disrespecting their – and, indirectly, everyone’s – freedom of speech.
When he berates the intelligence agencies and the federal bureau of investigation, he isn’t just questioning their competence. He’s suggesting they’re engaged in a giant conspiracy to remove him from office – potentially inviting his most ardent supporters to engage in a new civil war.
When he boasts that he made up information in a meeting with the prime minister of Canada, he isn’t just undermining his own credibility. He’s undermining the credibility of the united states in the eyes of the world.
Donald Trump is degrading the core institutions and values of our democracy.
But America is fighting back.
In Alabama, voters turned out in droves to elect a Democrat to the senate for the first time in 25 years. In Pennsylvania, Republicans lost control of a congressional district that went for Trump by nearly 20 percentage points. Since Trump took office, Democrats have flipped 39 Republican-held state legislative seats.
The 2018 midterm elections are approaching. It’s up to all of us to keep up the momentum. In the face of the worst president in history, we are at our best when striving to strengthen our democracy.
(RFE/RL) — Six Turkish nationals have been arrested in Kosovo and deported over ties to schools linked to the cleric whom Ankara blames for a failed 2016 coup.
The state-run Anadolu Agency reported on March 29 that the Turkish intelligence agency, MIT, used a private plane to take them back to Turkey.
Those sent back are said to be from a school network belonging to Fethullah Gulen, the cleric Erdogan blames for the 2016 failed coup in Turkey. Gulen, who lives in the United States, rejects the claim.
In a statement earlier, Kosovo’s Interior Ministry said those arrested had their residence permits revoked without specifying why.
Adem Vokshi, a lawyer of one of the arrested Turkish citizens, told RFE/RL that the six were arrested because they were identified by the Kosovo intelligence agency as risky individuals.
Vokshi said one of those arrested was a doctor and was not linked to the schools.
According to Andolu, the six were allegedly responsible for recruitment into Gulen’s network and helping those in Turkey leave the country amid a security crackdown in which tens of thousands of people have been fired or imprisoned over alleged Gulen links.
The Kosovo Human Rights Council urged the authorities on March 29 not to extradite the “political opponents of Erdogan” to Ankara.
Turkey is a major supporter of impoverished Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008, and Turkish firms run the tiny Balkan country’s sole airport and electricity network, and are building two highways worth around $2 billion.
A 34-year-old Catholic father of four was allegedly beaten to death by doctors and security guards at a government hospital in the Pakistani city of Lahore during an altercation after he responded to a female doctor slapping his heavily pregnant sister.
Suneel Saleem, 34, was critically injured during the beating on March 26 and later died in Services Hospital where the incident occurred.
“About 20 security guards and 14 doctors punched and attacked my brothers and cousins with batons, chairs and belts,” said Aneel Saleem, a brother of the deceased who was also attacked.
“We received internal injuries and called the police. The ribs and legs of Suneel were fractured. He fainted and later died in the same hospital,” said Aneel.
A complaint registered with the police on March 27, said the nine month pregnant sister was slapped by a female doctor. Local police have registered a murder case against five doctors and a number of the hospital’s security guards.
Father Qaiser Feroz, executive secretary of the Pakistani bishops’ social communications commission, conducted Suneel’s funeral also on March 27.
“This is a first of its kind tragedy.… People visit hospitals for treatment and doctors are supposed to save lives,” sad Father Feroz.
The administrators of Services Hospital have also filed an application with the police against the Catholic family for creating a ‘lawless’ situation.
Local media Dawn reported that a medical superintendent said: “The fighting began when hospital guards forced relatives of a patient to stop making a video of the ward with a mobile phone.”
Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif has offered his sympathy to Suneel’s family and ordered an inquiry into the incident.
The family joined about 300 people outside the Lahore Press Club on March 28 who were protesting over what occurred. “We want justice,” cried Suneel’s mother at the event.
Christian True Spirit, an NGO that aids victims of persecution, said they will offer free legal aid to the victim’s family and six months of financial support. The youngest of Suneel’s children is his 4-month-old daughter.
Discrimination of religious minorities by public officials is a regular phenomenon in Pakistan.
The Sahara Desert has expanded by about 10 percent since 1920, according to a new study by University of Maryland scientists. The research is the first to assess century-scale changes to the boundaries of the world’s largest desert and suggests that other deserts could be expanding as well. The study was published online in the Journal of Climate.
Deserts are typically defined by low average annual rainfall–usually 100 millimeters (less than 4 inches) of rain per year or less. The researchers analyzed rainfall data recorded throughout Africa from 1920 to 2013 and found that the Sahara, which occupies much of the northern part of the continent, expanded by 10 percent during this period when looking at annual trends.
When the authors looked at seasonal trends over the same time period, the most notable expansion of the Sahara occurred in summer, resulting in a nearly 16 percent increase in the desert’s average seasonal area over the 93-year span covered by the study.
“Our results are specific to the Sahara, but they likely have implications for the world’s other deserts,” said Sumant Nigam, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic science at UMD and the senior author of the study. Nigam also has a joint appointment in UMD’s Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC).
The study results suggest that human-caused climate change, as well as natural climate cycles such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), caused the desert’s expansion. The geographical pattern of expansion varied from season to season, with the most notable differences occurring along the Sahara’s northern and southern boundaries.
“Deserts generally form in the subtropics because of the Hadley circulation, through which air rises at the equator and descends in the subtropics,” Nigam said. “Climate change is likely to widen the Hadley circulation, causing northward advance of the subtropical deserts. The southward creep of the Sahara however suggests that additional mechanisms are at work as well, including climate cycles such as the AMO.”
The Sahara is the world’s largest warm-weather desert, roughly equal in size to the contiguous United States. (The Arctic basin and the Antarctic continent–which are each about twice as large as the Sahara–also qualify as deserts due to their low rates of precipitation.) Like all deserts, the boundaries of the Sahara fluctuate with the seasons, expanding in the dry winter and contracting during the wetter summer.
The southern border of the Sahara adjoins the Sahel, the semi-arid transition zone that lies between the Sahara and the fertile savannas further south. The Sahara expands as the Sahel retreats, disrupting the region’s fragile grassland ecosystems and human societies. Lake Chad, which sits in the center of this climatologically conflicted transition zone, serves as a bellwether for changing conditions in the Sahel.
“The Chad Basin falls in the region where the Sahara has crept southward. And the lake is drying out,” Nigam explained. “It’s a very visible footprint of reduced rainfall not just locally, but across the whole region. It’s an integrator of declining water arrivals in the expansive Chad Basin.”
A number of well-known climate cycles can affect rainfall in the Sahara and the Sahel. The AMO, in which temperatures over a large swath of the northern Atlantic Ocean fluctuate between warm and cold phases on a 50- to 70-year cycle, is one example. Warm phases of the AMO are linked to increased rainfall in the Sahel, while the opposite is true for the cold phase. For example, the notable drying of the Sahel from the 1950s to the 1980s has been attributed to one such cold phase. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), marked by temperature fluctuations in the northern Pacific Ocean on a scale of 40 to 60 years, also plays a role.
To single out the effects of human-caused climate change, the researchers used statistical methods to remove the effects of the AMO and PDO on rainfall variability during the period from 1920 to 2013. The researchers concluded that these natural climate cycles accounted for about two-thirds of the total observed expansion of the Sahara. The remaining one-third can be attributed to climate change, but the authors note that longer climate records that extend across several climate cycles are needed to reach more definitive conclusions.
“Many previous studies have documented trends in rainfall in the Sahara and Sahel. But our paper is unique, in that we use these trends to infer changes in the desert expanse on the century timescale,” said Natalie Thomas, a graduate student in atmospheric and oceanic science at UMD and lead author of the research paper.
The study’s results have far-reaching implications for the future of the Sahara, as well as other subtropical deserts around the world. As the world’s population continues to grow, a reduction in arable land with adequate rainfall to support crops could have devastating consequences.
“The trends in Africa of hot summers getting hotter and rainy seasons drying out are linked with factors that include increasing greenhouse gases and aerosols in the atmosphere,” said Ming Cai, a program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, which funded the research. “These trends also have a devastating effect on the lives of African people, who depend on agriculture-based economies.”
Thomas and Nigam are focused on learning more about the drivers behind desert expansion in the Sahara and beyond.
“With this study, our priority was to document the long-term trends in rainfall and temperature in the Sahara. Our next step will be to look at what is driving these trends, for the Sahara and elsewhere,” Thomas explained. “We have already started looking at seasonal temperature trends over North America, for example. Here, winters are getting warmer but summers are about the same. In Africa, it’s the opposite–winters are holding steady but summers are getting warmer. So the stresses in Africa are already more severe.”
The modern-day theoretical physicist faces a taxing uphill climb.
“As we learn more, reality becomes ever more subtle; the absolute becomes relative, the fixed becomes dynamical, the definite is laden with uncertainty,” writes physicist Yasha Neiman.
A professor and head of the Quantum Gravity Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), he grapples with this conundrum on a daily basis. Quantum gravity, Neiman’s branch of physics, aims to unify quantum mechanics, which describes nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles, with Einstein’s theory of General Relativity–the modern theory of gravitation as curvature of space and time. How, he asks, can physicists write equations when the geometry of space itself becomes subject to quantum uncertainty? Quantum gravity, the current frontier in fundamental theory, has proven more difficult to detangle than previous concepts, according to Neiman.
“With the concept of space slipping between our fingers, we seek out alternative footholds on which to base our description of the world,” he writes.
This search for alternative footholds is, in essence, a search for a new language to describe reality–and it is the subject of his most recent work, published in the Journal of High Energy Physics. In the paper, Neiman proposes a new vantage point on the geometry of space and time–one that builds on well-established approaches in physics, like holography and twistor theory, to reach new ground.
Holography is an offshoot of string theory–the theory that the Universe is made up of one-dimensional objects called strings–which was developed in the late 1990s. Holography imagines the ends of the Universe as the surface of an infinitely large sphere that forms the boundary of space. Even as geometry fluctuates within this sphere, this “boundary at infinity” on the sphere’s surface can remain fixed.
For the past 20 years, holography has been an invaluable tool for conducting quantum-gravity thought experiments. However, astronomical observations have shown that this approach cannot really apply to our world.
“The accelerating expansion of our Universe and the finite speed of light conspire to limit all possible observations, present or future, to a finite–though very large–region of space,” Neiman writes.
In such a world, the boundary at infinity, where the holographic picture of the Universe is based, is no longer physically meaningful. A new frame of reference may be needed–one that does not attempt to find a fixed surface in space, but which leaves space behind altogether.
In the 1960s, in an attempt to understand quantum gravity, physicist Roger Penrose proposed such a radical alternative. In Penrose’s twistor theory, geometric points are replaced by twistors–entities that most closely resemble stretched, light ray-like shapes. Within this twistor space, Penrose discovered a highly efficient way to represent fields that travel at the speed of light, such as electromagnetic and gravitational fields. Reality, however, is composed of more than fields–one needs also to account for the interactions between them, such as the electric force between charges, or, in the more complicated case of General Relativity, gravitational attraction resulting from the energy of the field itself. However, including the interactions of General Relativity into this picture has proven a formidable task.
So, then, can we express in twistor language a full-fledged quantum gravitational theory, perhaps simpler than General Relativity, but with both fields and interactions fully taken into account? Yes, according to Neiman.
Neiman’s model builds on higher spin gravity, a model developed by Mikhail Vasiliev in the 1980s and 90s. Higher spin gravity can be thought of as the “smaller cousin” of String Theory, “too simple to reproduce General Relativity, but very instructive as a playground for ideas,” as Neiman puts it. In particular, it is perfectly suited for exploring possible bridges between holography and twistor theory.
On one hand, as discovered by Igor Klebanov and Alexander Polyakov in 2001, higher spin gravity, just like string theory, can be described holographically: its behavior within space can be captured completely in terms of a boundary at infinity. On the other hand, its equations contain twistor-like variables, even if these are still tied to particular points in ordinary space.
From these starting points, Neiman’s paper takes an additional step, constructing a mathematical dictionary that ties together the languages of holography and twistor theory.
“The underlying math that makes this story tick is all about square roots,” writes Neiman. “It’s about identifying subtle ways in which a geometric operation, such as a rotation or reflection, can be done ‘halfway’. A clever square root is like finding a crack in a solid wall, opening it in two, and revealing a new world.”
Using square roots in this way has a long-standing history in math and physics. In fact, the intrinsic shape of all matter particles–such as electrons and quarks–as well as twistors, is described by a square root of ordinary directions in space. In a subtle technical sense, Neiman’s method for connecting space, its boundary at infinity, and twistor space, boils down to taking such a square root again.
Neiman hopes that his proof of concept can pave the way towards a quantum theory of gravity that does not rely on a boundary at infinity.
“It will take a lot of creativity to uncover the code of the world,” says Neiman. “And there’s joy in fumbling around for it.”
Tripoli’s municipal council suspended work Thursday to protest the abduction of the city’s mayor, Abdul-Raouf Beit al-Mal, by unknown perpetrators, according to a council statement.
The mayor, the statement explained, had been abducted by unknown perpetrators who broke into his home in the city’s Khallet al-Furjan district and taken him to an unknown location.
The municipality called on Libya’s Tripoli-based UN-backed unity government to take “all necessary measures” to secure the mayor’s release.
No group has claimed responsibility for al-Mal’s abduction.
Libya has remained in disarray since 2011, when a bloody uprising ended with the ouster and death of President Muammar Gaddafi after more than four decades in power.
Since then, the country’s stark political divisions have yielded two rival seats of power — one in Tobruk and another in Tripoli — along with a host of heavily-armed militia groups.
The government of Malaysia’s proposed law criminalizing “fake news” is a frontal attack on free expression and should be withdrawn, Human Rights Watch said.
A clear target of the legislation is discussion in Malaysia and abroad of the corruption scandal involving Prime Minister Najib Razak and the country’s 1MDB fund. Najib has been accused of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars from 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). On March 21, 2018, the deputy communications minister stated that any news about 1MDB that has not been verified by the government is “fake news” and would be subject to government action.
“Malaysia’s ‘fake news’ bill is a blatant attempt by the government to prevent any and all news that it doesn’t like, whether about corruption or elections,” said Brad Adams, Asia director. “The proposed law uses draconian penalties and broad language in an audacious and unprecedented effort to control discussion of Malaysia worldwide.”
The Anti-Fake News 2018 bill, which was introduced in Parliament on March 26, carries up to 10 years in prison for knowingly creating, distributing, or publishing “fake news,” defined to include “news, information, data and reports” that are “wholly or partly false.” The law would also apply to individuals or organizations operating outside of the country if the “fake news” concerns Malaysia or affects Malaysian citizens.
The bill greatly expands the already broad set of laws in Malaysia, such as for criminal defamation, that penalize peaceful speech and create a climate of self-censorship and fear. The bill does not establish standards for determining what is false and does not distinguish between malicious falsehoods and simple errors on the part of a journalist or social media commentator.
The legislation would also require individuals, corporations, and internet platforms to “immediately” remove content if they have “reasonable grounds to believe it contains fake news.” Failure to do so could result in a criminal fine of up to 100,000 Malaysian ringgit (US$26,000).The bill places the burden on companies that host third-party content to make difficult determinations of whether that content is true under conditions that encourage suppression of lawful speech. Faced with short review periods and the risk of steep fines, companies will have little incentive to err on the side of free expression.
The bill also fails to provide either judicial oversight or a judicial remedy should a cautious corporate decision interfere with a person’s right to speak or access information.
Under the bill, anyone who claims to have been affected by “fake news” can apply to a court, with no notice to those who wrote or posted the material, for an order to remove the content. Notice of the order can be served electronically, including by sending it to an individual’s social media account. Failure to remove the material within the specified time could result in a criminal fine of 100,000 ringgit.
The public prosecutor may apply to the court for an order directing a police officer or other authorized officer to remove the content. While those affected can appeal, they would not be allowed to submit an application if the news is “prejudicial or likely to be prejudicial to public order or national security.”
On March 28 the Malaysian parliament approved controversial new constituency boundaries for upcoming national elections. Activists fear the fake news bill could be used against critics of gerrymandering or other elements of the electoral process.
“The Malaysian government has no monopoly on the truth, but it’s attempting to be the arbiter of what can and can’t be said and written,” Adams said. “The government should withdraw the bill immediately.”
An organic chemical compound shows effective antiviral activity against Ebola virus and several other viruses, according to a study led by Georgia State University.
The researchers found benzoquinoline inhibited the ability of Ebola virus to multiply and reproduce in cell culture. The findings are published in the journal Antiviral Research.
Ebola virus, a member of the filovirus family, is an enveloped, single-stranded RNA virus that causes severe disease in humans. The largest outbreak on record for the filovirus family was caused by Ebola virus in West Africa between 2013 and 2016, resulting in more than 28,000 infections and more than 11,000 deaths.
Only experimental treatments were available, and survivors, including health care workers, are at risk for persistent infections from the virus remaining in sites that can tolerate foreign substances without eliciting an inflammatory immune response, such as the eye and testes. There are no approved drugs to treat Ebola virus or other filovirus infections, so there is a critical need for new therapeutic approaches. A potential antiviral target is the viral machinery and activities involved in carrying out RNA synthesis for Ebola virus.
“This work provides a foundation for the development of novel antiviral agents to combat Ebola virus,” said Dr. Christopher Basler, director of the Center for Microbial Pathogenesis and professor in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Microbial Pathogenesis.
In this study, the researchers screened a library of 200,000 small molecule compounds to identify potential inhibitors of Ebola virus RNA synthesis. They identified 56 hits that inhibited Ebola virus activity by more than 70 percent, while showing less than a 20 percent chance of being toxic to cells. They discovered three chemical structures with potent antiviral activity against Ebola virus in cell culture.
Human lung epithelial cells and human embryonic kidney cells were exposed to several viruses, Ebola virus, Marburg virus, vesicular stomatitis virus and Zika virus, and the antiviral effects of the three chemical structures were observed.
One of these chemical structures, benzoquinoline, showed antiviral activity against Ebola virus and was also active against another deadly filovirus, Marburg virus. Benzoquinoline was also effective against vesicular stomatitis virus from the rhabdovirus family, which can infect insects, cattle, horses and pigs, and Zika virus, which is spread to humans by mosquitoes.
“This study is part of a larger effort to find new therapies to treat highly dangerous Ebola virus infections,” said lead author Dr. Priya Luthra of Georgia State.
“It’s really quite incredible how, at nearly every turn the New Zealand government has managed to mess up the legal case against Kim Dotcom.” — Mike Masnick, Techdirt, Mar 26, 2018
Put it down to his tigerish perseverance, or sheer faith in those powers of endurance, but Kim Dotcom’s victory before New Zealand’s Human Rights Tribunal had a stirring ring to it. The Tribunal found for Dotcom, awarding him NZ$30,000 for “loss of a benefit” and NZ$60,000 for “loss of dignity and injury to feelings” incurred by breaches of the Privacy Act by the previous NZ Attorney-General.
In July 2015, Dotcom made various information privacy requests on his case made notorious by the FBI’s pursuit of him as a notable founder of Megaupload, a data sharing and storage enterprise that rankled with the copyright fanatics on the other side of the pond. The information requests were directed at what specific material various officials in the New Zealand government held on him. These requests, instead of being dealt with in immediate fashion, were conveyed to a less than sympathetic Attorney-General, Chris Finlaysen.
The position of the authorities proved bleak, unsympathetic and dismissive to Dotcom. In the words of the Solicitor-General to the Privacy Commissioner, these “were not genuine Privacy Act requests but rather a litigation tactic and a fishing expedition” with “an ulterior motive”. That motive was to frustrate his ongoing extradition hearing which is being cheered on by US law enforcement authorities.
What unfolded was a procedural bungle of momentous proportion. All in all, the recipients of Dotcom’s requests were not meant to convey this to the Attorney-General. Like the Solicitor General, each should have considered the issue instead of claiming that “the information sought, to the extent it is held by other agencies, is more closely connected with [the] functions as Attorney-General.” The Solicitor General further compounded the issue by deeming Dotcom’s grounds “vexatious” and “trivial” in the nature of information being sought. Woe to privacy, indeed.
One line from the Tribunal is needlessly torturous but bears reiterating: “In these circumstances it was artificial for the Crown to argue that simply because the Attorney-General, Solicitor-General and Crown Law were the Crown’s legal advisers and conducting litigation against Mr. Dotcom the transferring agencies would properly believe the information to which the requests related were more closely connected to the functions or activities of the Attorney-General, Solicitor-General or Crown Law as the providers of legal advice and representation to the Crown.” No transfer, given the circumstances, was permitted.
In rather damnable fashion, then, the Attorney-General “had no authority, as transferee, to refuse to disclose the requested information.” Dotcom had effectively shown that “there was no proper basis for the refusal” under the Privacy Act.
The Tribunal was similarly unimpressed by the arguments advanced by the Attorney-General that an “ulterior motive” clouded Dotcom’s requests, marring them as vexatious for having an improper purpose. They duly found “that Mr Dotcom has amply satisfied us, to the civil standard, that contrary to the assertion by the Crown, he had no ulterior motive in making the information privacy requests.” These were genuine, having revealed no intention “to disrupt the extradition hearing.”
For those willing to read the judgment in full, a pile of mockery is heaped upon New Zealand’s error prone agencies. How, for instance, could a claim of irrelevance be made without Dotcom knowing what information on him was relevant to begin with?
A series of other failed efforts on the part of the government are also documented, including a good degree of errand boy behaviour before US masters. The failure to register, and to authorise a US forfeiture order that would have rendered Dotcom impecunious and incapable of mounting a defence against extradition, is highlighted with some disdain.
These chronicles on fumbling and bumbling have become thick folios of malice and incompetence. The spectacular dawn raid on Dotcom’s house in January 2012 was initially declared invalid by High Court justice Helen Winkelmann, having failed to specify what offence justified the raid and under what terms the warrant was being executed over.
Justice Winkelmann also ruled that the all-committed FBI had broken the law in removing digital material from Dotcom’s computers and taking it out of New Zealand. “They could not authorise the shipping offshore of those hard drives with no check to see if they contained relevant material.”
Rather oddly, the New Zealand appeals court overruled Justice Winkelmann’s findings despite admitting to defections in the warrants. “This really was a case of error of expression. The defects were defects in form not in substance.” Even a casual reading of the case would suggest their Honours to have gone into hibernation on this one.
Dotcom has also been the subject of keen interest from New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), the miniature, though not negligible counterpart of the US National Security Agency. When found that he had been the subject of illegal surveillance (NZ residents are supposedly exempt), police claimed that such breaches on the part of GCSB showed no “criminal intent” and declined to mount prosecutions.
For its non-criminal part, the GCSB proceeded to behave with suitably guilty minds in attempting to cover up evidence of such surveillance, only to then claim that an automatic “delete” function had removed aged material. Prime Minister John Key would claim with Alice in Wonderland absurdity that there were no missing files. “This is a spy agency,” he told Parliament. “We don’t delete things. We archive them.” Except, he conceded, when “raw material… ages off the system”. With delicious perversion, such data would have to be deleted by law as it was “no longer relevant”.
Little wonder, then, that Dotcom is overjoyed. Another legal canard biting the dust; another triumph to add to a bulging file. “After years of perseverance the time is here, we won, we’re getting to the truth,” he chortled in a joyful tweet. “I’m no longer the defendant.” Not quite – but on this occasion, his victory refocused attention on the subject of Dotcom as a person of legal worth, one singled out by the absurdist, malevolent tendencies of arbitrary state power.
Child sexual abuse in the United States is costly, with an average lifetime cost of $1.1 million per death of female victims and $1.5 million per death of male victims, according to a new study.
Researchers measured the economic costs of child sexual abuse by calculating health care costs, productivity losses, child welfare costs, violence/crime costs, special education costs and suicide death costs.
They estimated the total lifetime economic burden of child sexual abuse in the United States to be $9.3 billion, based on child sexual abuse data from 2015. For nonfatal cases of child sexual abuse, the estimated lifetime cost is $282,734 per female victim. There was insufficient information on productivity losses for male victims, which contributed to a lower estimated lifetime cost of $74,691. The findings are published in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect.
“This study reveals that the economic burden of child sexual abuse is substantial and signifies recognition that reducing children’s vulnerability will positively and directly impact the nation’s economic and social well-being and development,” said Dr. Xiangming Fang, associate professor of health management and policy in the School of Public Health at Georgia State University. “We hope our research will bring attention to the need for increased prevention efforts for child sexual abuse.”
The World Health Organization defines child sexual abuse as the involvement of a child in sexual activity that he or she does not fully comprehend, is unable to give informed consent to, is not developmentally prepared or violates the laws and social taboos of society. It is the activity between a child – anyone under the age of 18 in most states – and an adult or another child who by age or development is in a position of responsibility, trust or power.
Child sexual abuse includes commercial sexual exploitation and the use of children in pornographic performance and materials. The estimated prevalence rates of exposure to child sexual abuse by 18 years old are 26.6 percent for U.S. girls and 5.1 percent for U.S. boys. International rates of exposure are often higher in low- and middle-income countries. The effects of child sexual abuse include increased risk for development of severe mental, physical and behavioral health disorders; sexually transmitted diseases; self-inflicted injury, substance abuse and violence; and subsequent victimization and criminal offending.
The researchers examined data from 20 new cases of fatal child sexual abuse and 40,387 new cases of nonfatal child sexual abuse that occurred in 2015. The data were obtained from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System of the Children’s Bureau and child maltreatment reports issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
During his recent visit to New Hampshire on 3/20/18, President Trump declared once again that the US is facing a ‘drug epidemic’. This time he advocated the death penalty for criminal drug dealers as the solution to a national crisis that has killed over 1 million Americans since the 1990’s (when the blockbuster prescription opiate Oxycontin was first released on the market). Trump promised that the Justice Department would develop the most severe penalties for criminal drug traffickers, by which he meant foreigners. He argued that his proposed “Wall” (between the Mexican- US border) would cut the flow of drugs responsible for the ongoing addiction of millions of US citizens – as though the prescription opiate addiction epidemic resulted from a foreign invasion, and not corporate decisions from Big Pharma.
President Trump’s claim that 116 ‘drug deaths’ occur every day (42,000 a year) is a major underestimate. In 2017, alone over 64,000 drug overdose deaths were reported in official statistics (with many unreported cases signed off as natural or undetermined, especially in counties too poor to afford autopsies and expensive forensic toxicology). Another 4 million Americans, at least, are currently addicted to opioids and at risk for overdose.
In comparative terms, more American workers have been killed or devastated by narcotics (mostly via prescription) in 2017 alone, than in the entire decade of the Vietnam War with its 58,000 dead and 500,000 wounded. In 2017, 40,000 Americans died in motor vehicle accidents and another 39,000 by gun violence – and these statistics are not broken down to include vehicular accidents due to drug intoxication or gun violence over drugs. Prescription or illegal opiates, alone or mixed with other sedative drugs, like Valium, or alcohol, are the most prominent and preventable cause of premature death in the United States today.
This pattern is unique to the United States, where the irresponsible medical prescription of highly addicting narcotics has been the primary portal of entry into the degrading life of addiction for millions. Despite President Trump’s claims, the addiction crisis is not a product of urban Afro-American street dealers or Mexican narco-traffickers: This uniquely American crisis has been created and fueled by billionaire-owned US pharmaceutical corporations, which produced, distributed and wildly profited from legal narcotics. They were aided by the irresponsible prescription practice of tens of thousands of doctors and other ‘providers’ who introduced millions of vulnerable patients to the world of narcotic dependency – including youngsters with sports injuries and workers with job-related pain. These are physicians and medical providers who rarely stopped to examine their own responsibility, even when their otherwise healthy patients overdosed or were destroyed by addiction. It is especially outrageous that doctors and ‘Big Pharma’ worked hand in hand for over 20 years to create this epidemic, enjoying wild profits and almost total legal immunity. Few have dared to openly question their irresponsibility and greed. In the poorest and most vulnerable areas of this country, the most irresponsible and unaccountable incompetence has replaced real medical care and created a health care apartheid.
The Federal Drug Enforcement Agency (FDA) and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) have protected the corporate drug traffickers and ensured the manicured and cultured narco-bosses the highest rates of return on their products. These polished pushers have their names engraved on the walls of museums and opera houses around the country.
The majority of Presidential, Federal, State and municipal candidates from both major parties have received millions of dollars in electoral campaign funds from these huge legal narcotic manufacturers and distributors, as well as from physicians and other representative of the ‘pain-treatment industry’. Over the past decades, politicians have openly or secretly opposed or weakened legislation designed to address this crisis.
Why not just ask President Trump to direct his Justice Department to impose the death penalty on the board of directors of the big corporate narcotic manufacturers or distributors or on the CEOs of major ‘pain clinics’ or on the owners of local rural ‘health centers’ that drove the villagers of West Virginia into their life-destroying downward spirals?
When will the DEA finally storm the medical centers to arrest the over-prescribing ‘providers’ of narcotics and benzodiazepine tranquilizers (a very common deadly combination)?
When will the SWAT teams seize the vacation homes of the CEOs of major US hospitals where the convenient and fake ideology of promising a ‘pain-free’ experience (‘make it Zero on the Pain Scale’) led to the generalized promotion of highly addicting narcotics for minor injuries, arthritic pain, or chronic back discomfort due to work or obesity? Responsible alternatives existed and were used in the rest of the world – largely untouched by this prescription-fueled crisis.
No doubt what President Trump has in mind is something else: the expulsion of Latin American workers under the pretext of going after the drug dealers and the even more massive incarceration of petty street dealers in the African American community.
Trump will then turn to further monitoring and arresting small-scale American marijuana farmers, who earn a basic income from growing a product that many believe is safe, non-addicting, and significantly reduces demand for dangerous narcotics.
As ugly as this all seems, the complicity of the political, economic and the medical elite in exponentially spreading deadly narcotics among the poor, working class and downwardly mobile middle class, points to a deeper and more sinister policy goal: the systematic elimination of millions of American workers made redundant in the new economy. This is a ‘gentler genocide’, where millions of workers die prematurely seeking an escape from pain as they have been replaced by a new technology and a new ideology: Robots, artificial intelligence and digitalization have rendered them disposable, while the out-sourcing of work to low paid overseas laborers and immigrants have guaranteed unimaginable profits for the elite decision makers.
This highly profitable process, benefiting the political, pharmaceutical, financial, police and judicial elites, conveniently blames the victims, a significant proportion of whom come from the poor and working class in this country, including white rural and small town addicts, especially youth, stuck at minimum wage jobs with no prospects of a decent future – injured construction workers, 15% of whom abuse prescription narcotics for work-related injuries, as well as the marginalized petty drug dealers from the urban slums and desperate Latino immigrants forced to accommodate the cartels. These people have little rights and are easily monitored, incarcerated, expelled and just written-off in one-line obituaries.
The narcotic-fueled genocide had grown out of a calculated corporate strategy meant to cull and subdue a huge population of potentially restive marginalized workers and their families, blaming the overdosing victims for their own ‘irresponsible’ choices, their reliance on prescription opiates, their lack of access to competent medical care, and their untimely deaths as though this were all a collective suicide as the great nation marches forward.
The higher the death toll among marginalized Americans, the greater the reliance on political distractions and racist deceptions. President Trump loudly blames street-level retail distributors, while ignoring the links between tax-exempt mega-billionaires who have profited from the shortened life-expectancies of addicted workers (scores of billions of dollars already saved in future pension and health care expenses) and the millions fired for addiction and denied jobless benefits and treatment. Trump has yet to even mention the actions of the legal pharma-medical industry that set this in motion.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party leaders denounce the worker-victims of addiction and their communities as ‘irresponsible and racist’, for having believed the populist rhetoric of candidate Trump. Trump’s most intense rural areas of support coincided with areas of the worst opioid addiction and suicide rates. Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton wrote off scores of millions of vulnerable Americans as ‘deplorables’ and never once addressed the addiction crisis that grew exponentially during her husband’s administration.
Since the implementation of NAFTA during the 1990’s, scores of millions of American workers have been relegated to unstable, low paid jobs, deprived of health benefits and subject to grueling work, prone to physical and mental injuries. Workplace injuries set the stage for the prescription narcotic crisis. Even worse, today workers are constantly distracted by electronic gadgets at the workplace, with their orders from above arriving digitally. These highly profitable gadgets have created enormous distractions and contributed to workplace death and injuries. The plaything of choice for the masses, the I-phone, has added to the addiction crisis, by increasing the rate of injury. This mind-numbing distraction, produced abroad at incredible profit, has played an unexplored role in the increase in premature death in the US.
The corporate narcotic elites, like the ultra-cultured Sackler clan owners of Perdue Pharmaceuticals, and their allies in the finance sector, support the diverse ideological distractions fashioned by their politician pawns: Eager to please her donor-owners, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats blame the working class for their backwardness and genetic propensity to addiction and degradation. Meanwhile, President Trump and the Republicans blame ‘outside’ suppliers and distributors including Mexican narco-cartels, illegal immigrant traffickers, black urban street dealers and now point to overseas Chinese fentanyl labs – as though the entire crisis came from the outside. Trump’s approach flies in the face of the unquestionable source of most narcotic addiction in the US: Irresponsible prescribing of highly addicting legal narcotics.
No other industrialized country is experiencing this scale of addiction and pre-mature death. No other industrialized country relies on a private, for-profit, unregulated system of delivering medical care to its citizens. Only the US.
Both elite political parties avoid the basic issue of the long-term, large-scale structural imperatives underlying the transformation of the US work places. They refuse to address the marginalization of tens of millions of American workers and their families, made disposable by corporate economic and political decisions.
The US corporate elite are completely incapable of developing, let alone favoring, any policy that addresses the needs of millions of surplus office and factory workers and their family members replaced by new technology and ‘global’ economic policies. The American financial and political elite is not about to support an economic, political and cultural ‘GI’ bill to save the scores of millions shoved to the wayside in their rush to obscene wealth and power.
The unstated, but clearly implemented, ‘final solution’ is a Social Darwinian policy of active and passive neglect, the unleashing of profitable prescription narcotics into the population of vulnerable disposable workers, offering them a convenient, painless way out – the opioid solution to the over-population problem of redundant rural and small town ‘Helots’. The political elite’s willing complicity with Big Pharma, the medical profession, the financial oligarchs and the prison-industrial complex has transformed the country in many ways. Shortened lives and depopulation of rural and small town communities translates into lower demand for public services, such as schools, health care, pensions and housing. This is guaranteeing a greater concentration of national wealth in the hands of a tiny elite. The financial press has openly celebrated the projected decrease in pension liabilities as a result of the drop in worker life expectancy.
The ongoing mass genocide by opioids may have started to arouse popular discontent among working people who do not want to continue dying young and miserable! Social services and child protective services for the millions of orphaned or abandoned children of this crisis have been demanding real policies. Unfortunately, the usual platitudes and failed policies prevail. Drug education and ‘opioid addiction treatment’ programs (currently among the largest expense in some union health plans) are pointless Band-Aids when confronted by the larger policy decisions fuelling this crisis. Nevertheless, thousands of health care professionals are beginning to resist corporate pressure to prescribe cheap opioids – and fight for more expensive, but less dangerous, alternative for addressing their patients’ pain. Even if all medical providers stopped over-prescribing narcotics today, there are still millions of addicts already created by past practice, who seek the most deadly street drugs, like fentanyl, to feed their addiction.
Politicians now publicly denounce ‘Big Pharma’, while privately winking at the lobbyists and accepting millions from their ‘donor-owners’.
Public critics in the corporate media are quick to condemn the workers’ susceptibility to narcotic addiction but not the underlying causative imperatives of global capitalism.
Mainstream academics celebrate corporate technological advances with occasional neo-Malthusian warnings about the dangers of millions of redundant workers, while ignoring the profit-driven role of narcotics in reducing the social threat of excess workers!
Finally the role of an elite and respected profession must be re-evaluated in a historic context: In the 1930’s German doctors helped develop an ideology of ‘racial hygiene’ and a technology to demonize and eliminate millions of human beings deemed redundant and inferior, through overwork in slave camps, starvation and active genocide – serving the ambitions of Nazi expansionism and deriving significant profit for select individuals and corporations. US physicians and the broader medical community have less consciously assisted in the ongoing ‘culling of the herd’ of American laborers and rural residents rendered superfluous and undesirable by the decisions of a global oligarchy increasingly unwilling to share public wealth with its masses. There are similarities.
Once prosperous, industrial cities and towns, as well as rural villages, in the US have seen marked declines in populations and a premature death crisis among those who remain.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge George Daniels rejected a request by Saudi Arabia to dismiss lawsuits accusing the nation of assisting in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, and asserted jurisdiction based on the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), a federal law passed in 2016. Previously, Saudi Arabia had broad based immunity from 9/11 lawsuits in the United States.
JASTA provides a legal exemption to the principle of sovereign immunity, thus allowing foreign governments to be held liable in U.S. courts. Daniels said the plaintiffs’ allegations “narrowly articulate a reasonable basis” for him to assert jurisdiction under JASTA. However, Daniels dismissed claims against a Saudi construction company and two Saudi banks for allegedly providing material support to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to carry out the attacks, claiming he lacked jurisdiction.
Daniels said the plaintiffs could try to prove that Saudi Arabia was liable for the alleged activities of Fahad al Thumairy, an imam at the King Fahad Mosque in Culver City, California, and Omar al Bayoumi, said to be an intelligence officer.
They were accused of helping two hijackers acclimate themselves to the United States, and begin preparing for the attacks.
Victims’ families, in court documents, highlighted that nearly all of the hijackers were Saudi citizens, and claimed that Saudi officials and institutions “aided and abetted” the attackers in the years leading up to the 9/11 attacks. Reuters reported that “Daniels’ decision covers claims by the families of those killed, roughly 25,000 people who suffered injuries, and many businesses and insurers.”
The government of Saudi Arabia has steadfastly denied involvement in the 9/11 attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed. Jim Kreindler, an attorney for roughly 850 victims’ families in the case against the Saudi government, told Reuters on Wednesday he is “delighted” that the judge dismissed Saudi Arabia’s motion.
“We have been pressing to proceed with the case and conduct discovery from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, so that the full story can come to light, and expose the Saudi role in the 9/11 attacks,” he added.
JASTA was vetoed by then-President Barack Obama, who claimed that the bill “could expose U.S. companies, troops and officials to lawsuits in other countries,” but the Senate overrode the veto by an overwhelming margin to adopt the legislation.
Despite the judge’s ruling, there is still a possibility that the federal government could intervene on behalf of the Saudi government. As previously reported by the author for The Free Thought Project in September 2016, a last-minute amendment was inserted into the JASTA legislation called the “Stay of Actions Pending State Negotiations,” which allows the U.S. attorney general or secretary of state to simply “certify” that the U.S. is “engaged in good-faith discussions with the foreign-state defendant concerning the resolution of claims against the foreign state.”
After the amendment was added to the JASTA bill, victims’ families said they felt betrayed by Congress.
How do I feel about the Justice Department being given this power? Not good,” 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser told the NY Post. “Their failure to bring their own Saudi indictment reveals how little they care about holding the Saudis accountable for either their funding or operational support of the 9/11 hijackers.
The Middle East Eye reported that “Wednesday’s ruling comes during Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to the US. President Donald Trump heaped praise on the Saudi royal during a meeting at the White House last week.”
About the author:
*Jay Syrmopoulos is a geopolitical analyst, freethinker, and ardent opponent of authoritarianism. He is currently a graduate student at the University of Denver pursuing a masters in Global Affairs and holds a BA in International Relations. Jay’s writing has been featured on both mainstream and independent media – and has been viewed tens of millions of times.
Despite recent technological advances, the costs for migrants to send money across borders to their families remain extremely expensive, with fees often surpassing 5%. This column explores the various factors shaping remittance prices and identifies two key avenues for cost reduction: consumer education and competition. In particular, expanding mobile technology is helping to displace banks and squeeze remittance costs.
By Stephen Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz*
“With the implementation of ‘know your client’ rules, anti-money laundering efforts, and so on, it has become increasingly difficult to have an efficient payments system. Many banks have retired from the business, for example, of handling remittances, which are a very important source of income for many emerging markets.”
Guillermo Ortiz, 19 March 2015.1
When migrants send money across borders to their families, it promotes economic activity and supports incomes in some of the poorest countries of the world. Annual cross-border remittances are running about $600 billion, three quarters of which flow to low- and middle-income countries. To put that number into perspective, total development assistance worldwide is $150 billion.2 Indeed, for many countries, these transfers account for a significant fraction of people’s incomes. For example, in Guatemala, the Philippines, and Senegal, remittances exceed 10% of GDP.
Yet, despite the remarkable technological advances of recent decades, remittances remain extremely expensive. The virtues of domestic payments systems like Zelle, an inexpensive, bank-run means for person-to-person transfers up to several thousand dollars, are very clear (Cecchetti and Schoenholtz 2017b). The marginal cost of using Zelle is zero – that is, for customers of the bank, there is no charge.
Cross-border remittances are far from costless. On average, the charge for sending $200 – the benchmark used by authorities to evaluate cost – is $14. That is, the combination of fees (including charges from both the sender and recipient intermediaries) and the exchange rate margin typically eats up fully 7% of the amount sent. It is less expensive to send larger amounts, with the global average cost of sending $500 at just under 5% (World Bank 2017b). Even so, the aggregate cost of sending remittances in 2017 was about $30 billion, roughly equivalent to the total non-military foreign aid budget of the US!
In this column, we discuss remittances, why their costs remain high, and what might be done to lower them.
Remittances are up sharply…
We start with a quick look at some data. Figure 1 below shows that the inflation-adjusted volume of remittances exploded over the past two decades. Today, these flows are triple what they were in 2000 and five times what they were in 1990. Furthermore, the economic importance of inward remittances has increased for low- and middle-income countries, rising from an average of 1.2% of GDP in 1990 to 1.6% of GDP today.
Figure 1 Aggregate volume of remittances, 1970-2017 (billions of 2017 US$)
Note: Inflation-adjusted sum of country-specific remittance flows. Source: World Bank.
…but costs have receded slowly
You might think that this massive increase in volume either reflects, or promotes, cost-reducing advances in remittance technology. But, as the next figure shows, costs have trended lower only gradually, and with considerable differences across types of transfer agents and across sender countries. The red line is the simple, unweighted average for all providers – banks, money transfer operators (MTOs, including fintech companies) and post offices – of sending $200 from the full World Bank sample of 48 sending countries. Over the past decade, this global average has fallen from 9.8% to 7.1%. However, in the case of MTOs (the dashed, black line), like Western Union, the cost has stagnated in recent years. After falling by 2.5 percentage points before 2014, the average charge remains around 8%. And, in the US (the blue line), the cost has declined only very modestly, falling from just over 7% in 2009 to roughly 6%, where it has stayed for three years.
Importantly, remittances are a very profitable business for large operators. Western Union, for example, completed 268 million customer-to-customer transfers in 2016, with a value of $80 billion. Total revenue for the year exceeded $5 billion, with net profits surpassing $250 million.3
Figure 2 Average cost of sending $200 across a border, 2008-17 (% of total)
Note: The red and black lines show the evolution of the average cost of sending funds from any one of 48 sending countries to any of 105 receiving countries in the sample. The data include a total of 365 pairs (or corridors). The blue line shows the cost of sending from the US. Source: World Bank.
Drilling down to the corridor level (that is, to specific country pairs), remittance costs vary considerably, but still strike us as high in most instances. Take the benchmark case of sending $200 or the equivalent. The average cost of a transfer from the US to Mexico is $8.91; from Germany to Turkey, it is $12.83; and from South Africa to Botswana, the average is a whopping $36.60.
Even within a specific corridor, the cost varies substantially. For example, someone wishing to send $200 from Italy to Morocco would pay anywhere from $1.93, if they were able to use the internet service provided by Transferwise, to $14 if they went to Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, a commercial bank. Using a Western Union agent for that same transfer would cost $10.17. While the speed of the transfer varies somewhat, the vast majority of services provide funds the next day or sooner.4
Needed: Education, competition and technology
As mentioned, the aggregate global cost of these transfers is now roughly $30 billion per year. While the direct cost is borne by the migrant senders and their family recipients, there is a sense in which the burden also falls on poor countries as a whole. The reason is that remittances enhance growth in poor countries by providing alternative means for financing investment where transactions costs are high (Giuliano and Ruiz-Arranz 2009). That is, we can think of policies that make remittances easier and cheaper as a means of boosting capital formation and productivity in receiving countries.
Against this background, in July 2009 the leaders of the largest advanced economies (G8) pledged to reduce the cost of remittances to 5% – a commitment endorsed by the G20 in 2011 and again in 2014, and included in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 (G8 2009, G20 2011, United Nations 2015). After eight years, the global average is roughly half-way there. What can be done to lower remittance costs further?
There are two major mechanisms for reducing costs: education and competition. On the first, what if customers became sufficiently well informed that they only use the cheapest available services? To answer this question, the World Bank has computed what they call the Smart Remitter Target (SmaRT). This competitive benchmark is the average of the three lowest-cost remittance service providers in each corridor. At the end of 2017, the global SmaRT average was 5.17%. This means that a process of education alone might be sufficient to reduce the average cost by as much as 2 percentage points.5
Turning to competition, Beck and Martínez Pería (2009) conclude that corridors with more migrants and more competition exhibit lower costs. Importantly, over one-half of all remittances are paid to persons in just ten countries (see below). However, where banks’ share in the business is high, costs are high as well. In fact, in the December 2017 issue of Remittance Prices Worldwide, the World Bank reports that remittance costs vary substantially by the instrument used, with transfers using cash and bank accounts costing 7%, much more than the 4.2% average cost of using mobile money (World bank 2017a). It appears that expanding mobile technology (and displacing banks) will help squeeze remittance costs.
Figure 3 Top 10 countries for inward remittances, 2017 (billions of $)
Source: World Bank.
The challenge: Cut costs while preventing crime
But, as Guillermo Ortiz suggests in the quote at the top of this column, a key challenge looms. Most forms of cross-border funds transfer require the cooperation of a bank at some point in the process. An MTO, for example, needs accounts at banks on both ends of the transfer corridor. However, in response to stronger anti-money-laundering standards, banks have been terminating or restricting their relationships with MTOs (KNOMAD 2017).
From the perspective of a bank, mobile payments create similar risks. As is the case for virtual currencies like Bitcoin, mobile payments systems can be used to conceal nefarious activities (Cecchetti and Schoenholtz 2017a). Meeting the ‘know your customer’ standards that banks demand (and governments expect) is expensive. As a result, these factors may continue to throttle the speed with which cost-competitive technology firms make inroads into the remittance business.
That said, the goal of reducing the cost of small remittances to 5% is clearly within reach. And, efforts to streamline the know your customer and anti-money laundering processes (including through the use of legal entity identifiers) could get us there (and beyond) faster.6
*About the authors:
Stephen Cecchetti, Rosen Family Chair in International Finance, Brandeis International Business School
Kim Schoenholtz, Henry Kaufman Professor of the History of Financial Institutions and Markets, NYU Stern School of Business
References:
Beck, T and M Soledad Martinez Peria (2009), “What explains the cost of remittances? An examination across 119 country corridors”, World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper Series 5072.
The Long March generation of revolutionary leaders is widely acknowledged as the founding heroes of modern China. But there is another generation ̶ the Cultural Revolution survivors ̶ whose experience during that tumultuous period shaped them in a similar way and who are now leading the country.
By Han Fook Kwang*
China’s rise to superpower status is being accompanied by President Xi Jinping’s growing strength as undisputed leader now that he is no longer constrained by a term limit on his presidency. As many have noted, he can now rule China indefinitely.
You will find as many who believe China’s future looks even more promising with political stability now assured as those concerned about the dangers of over concentrating power in the hands of one man for an extended period. Look at what happened to Chairman Mao Zedong, the doomsayers might point out.
Happy Coincidence or Recipe for Disaster?
The Cultural Revolution launched by the Great Helmsman in 1966 plunged the country into mayhem and turmoil. As many as half a million people died, according to some estimates, and millions were tortured, turning family members against one another and students into rampaging execution squads.
It was one of the darkest periods in Chinese history, one its people would never forget and resolved never to repeat. Lesson? An unchallenged leader’s misguided actions and excesses can bring national calamity? But out of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, China’s next ruler Deng Xiaoping emerged to set the country right, opening it up to the world, freeing and modernising the economy.
China has not looked back since. Lesson? A strongman rule might be exactly what a country needs when it faces grave challenges?
Lessons from the Cultural Revolution
Which of these two lessons is the right one for China today? Much rests on the shoulders of President Xi and what lessons he drew from that tumultuous period. In fact, he endured great personal hardship, and was singled out for special treatment because his father, a senior Communist Party official, had been purged a few years earlier.
His home was ransacked, the family had to flee and one of his sisters died during the struggle. He was 13 at the time. Xi was subsequently sent to the countryside along with millions of other urban youths for “re-education”.
For seven years in a remote village in Shaanxi province, he experienced poverty, living in a flea-infested cave home, doing hard manual work including carrying heavy loads.
But he was not alone among his generation shaped by those ten tumultuous years. Many are now in leadership positions, among them Premier Li Keqiang who has just been re-elected to a second term and chief anti-graft buster Wang Qishan who is now Vice President. Both were similarly “sent down” to the countryside.
Battle-hardened Survivors
It is remarkable that having suffered so much under a system that was capable of creating such madness, they did not lose confidence in the party. Instead, as President Xi has remarked several times, the experience exposed him and his fellow urban colleagues to the realities facing the rural poor and made them even more determined to do something about it.
They understood what it meant to be poor. More significantly, they grew up quickly, knowing what it meant to be so close to grave personal dangers. Most western commentaries of this dark period in Chinese history focus on the dangers of tyrannical autocratic rule.
It is a relevant point but not the most important. The more significant outcome of the Cultural Revolution was the creation of a generation of tough, battled hardened survivors who did not turn against the system but worked within it to make a difference.
China’s Two Defining Generations
China thus has had two remarkable generations.
The Long March generation led by Mao and leaders like Deng and Zhou Enlai earned their right to rule China leading a popular people’s revolt against a corrupt leadership.
They survived a gruelling 9,600-kilometre trek in 1934, through some of the most uninhabitable parts of the country to escape the advancing Kuomintang army, finally ending in Yanan in the northern province of Shaanxi after almost two years. Only one in ten of the original 80,000 troops survived.
But it was enough to form the core of the revolutionary army that would eventually triumph and establish the People’s Republic of China. The contributions of this generation of Long Marchers to modern China’s rise is widely accepted.
Not as well acknowledged is the role being played by the subsequent Cultural Revolution generation led by President Xi and members of the ruling Politburo most of whom are in their 60s. Like the Long March survivors, they too endured much hardship and emerged stronger from the experience. Thousands of others from that generation now occupy leadership positions in the public service and business.
It is rare for a country to have two remarkable generations of leaders and people, shaped and hardened by a common set of experiences. China’s amazing modernising trajectory can be attributed to this two-stage generational boost.
Future generations may not have such defining histories and the country’s future prospects will be shaped accordingly. But, by then, China’s take-off would be well underway and approaching cruising altitude.
*Han Fook Kwang is a Senior Fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies(RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.
To borrow from a philosophical thought experiment: If a volcano erupts in a remote part of the world and no one hears it, does it still make a sound?
Indeed, it does. And not only does the sound occur, but it also can tell scientists about the timing and duration of the eruption itself.
As part of the United Nations’ Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, an International Monitoring System was built to detect any nuclear explosion on Earth — underground, underwater or in the atmosphere. Within that system is a network to detect atmospheric infrasound — sound waves with frequencies below the lower limit of human audibility — which scientists can also use to track volcanic eruptions in remote locations.
A new case study by an international team of scientists, led by UC Santa Barbara geophysicist Robin Matoza, examined data from the 2015 eruption of the Calbuco volcano in the Los Lagos Region of Chile. The researchers chose this event because they could compare long-range data with local readings, enabling study of the large volcanic explosion using infrasound sensors.
The team’s analysis demonstrated that infrasound recorded at regional (15 to 250 kilometers) and long distances (greater than 250 km), such as on the International Monitoring System, delivered similar constraints on the timing and duration of the eruption, as did data from a local (less than 15 km) seismic network. Their results appear in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.
“We want to be able to monitor regions in the world where many volcanoes do not have local monitoring stations like Calbuco does,” said Matoza, an assistant professor in UCSB’s Department of Earth Science. “In some places — for example, the Aleutian Islands in Alaska — it’s challenging to maintain observation networks on the volcanoes themselves due to harsh weather and their remote locations. Consequently, many Aleutian volcanoes are not instrumented. We want to be able to detect, locate and characterize remote explosive volcanic activity because eruptions can release ash clouds into the atmosphere, which are hazardous to aircraft.”
In remote locales, researchers usually rely on satellite-based technology to monitor volcanoes, but according to Matoza, without ground-based information, it’s difficult to know exactly when the eruption happened and how long it lasted.
“What’s nice about infrasound is that we are able to gather information farther from the source than with traditional ground-based monitoring methods,” Matoza explained. “Typically, seismic signals from eruptions don’t propagate more than a few hundred kilometers from the source. With Calbuco, for example, you can see the eruption very clearly on the local monitoring stations and out to about 250 kilometers on regional seismic networks, but with infrasound, the signal propagates in the atmosphere for more than 5,000 kilometers. What’s more, infrasound delivers different information than seismic data alone.”
The Chilean national seismic network includes a relatively sparse number of infrasound sensors co-located with 10 seismometers (seismo-acoustic stations), which enabled this study. Placing such infrasound sensors at more seismic stations in volcanically active regions would be valuable, Matoza noted. The fact that one of the Chilean seismo-acoustic stations was only 250 kilometers from the eruption highlights the significant potential of existing regional seismic networks for augmenting the International Monitoring System with more infrasound sensors for eruption detection and monitoring.
“One of the recommendations from this study is that more seismic networks should also have infrasound sensors,” Matoza said. “It’s one extra channel of data to record that provides very useful information for improving volcano monitoring.”
Leading the worldwide effort to get a better handle on methane emissions from animals, an international consortium of researchers devised more accurate models to estimate the amount of the potent greenhouse gas produced by dairy cattle.
In a large study that involved individual data from more than 5,200 lactating dairy cows, assembled through a collaboration of animal scientists from 15 countries, researchers discovered that methane emissions from dairy cattle can be predicted using simplified models. Because feed dry-matter intake is the key factor for methane production prediction, the new models require readily available feed-related variables.
These more accurate models can be used to develop region-specific enteric –intestinal — methane inventories, explained lead researcher Alex Hristov, professor of dairy nutrition, Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences. He pointed out that the large scope of the project resulted in previously unreachable conclusions.
“Developing such a large database of individual animal data has never been done before,” he said. “When we put this project together four years ago, we contacted researchers around the world with a consortium agreement so we could collect confidential data from their studies, and they provided individual animal data for methane emissions and all related measurements. That gave us the opportunity to develop more robust, more accurate prediction models for enteric methane emissions.”
Although complex models that use both feed intake and detailed chemical composition had the best performance in predicting methane production, models requiring only feed dry-matter intake and dietary fiber content had the second-best predictive ability. Those offer an alternative to complex models currently being used by regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“The EPA inventory is based on a complicated set of equations with high uncertainty,” Hristov said.
A major finding of the research, which was published this month in Global Change Biology, is that revised methane emission conversion factors for specific regions are expected to improve emission estimates in national inventories. The concept of applying a methane emission conversion factor was introduced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to indicate the proportion of an animal’s energy intake that is converted to energy in methane.
This factor is widely used for national greenhouse gas emission inventories and global research on mitigation strategies. The research by the consortium, Hristov noted, offers opportunities to include region-specific methane conversion factors in national inventories. This is essential to improve the accuracy of carbon footprint assessments of dairy cattle production systems in regions around the world and to help devise mitigation strategies.
“Dairy cows in different regions of the world, depending on their diets, their genetics and their management systems, belch different amounts and intensities of methane,” Hristov said.
The team that conducted the study — part of the Feeding and Nutrition Network of the Livestock Research Group within the Global Research Alliance for Agricultural Greenhouse Gases — is currently developing similar databases for predicting enteric methane emissions from beef cattle, sheep and goats. “We started with dairy cattle because more research data is available for dairy animals,” Hristov said.
Having more robust and accurate models for predicting enteric methane emissions from livestock is important, Hristov pointed out, because these emissions represent a significant portion of global greenhouse gases blamed for causing climate change. And if current and future mitigation efforts are to be measured and analyzed for their effectiveness, regulatory agencies must have accurate data for existing enteric methane levels and resulting decreases.
(EurActiv) — Superfast 5G mobile networks come with “extremely dangerous” cybersecurity risks, the EU cybersecurity agency ENISA has warned. 5G is expected to become available to European consumers by 2025.
The European Commission and national governments around Europe are racing to make 5G available quickly, and have been pushing telecoms operators to invest billions of euros in the new technology.
But ENISA has poked holes in the high-flying political talk about 5G: fast mobile connections come with a “medium to high risk” of cybersecurity attacks, according to the Athens-based agency.
Companies are pinning their hopes for a boom in revenues on 5G because it is expected to drive sophisticated Internet-connected machines that process huge amounts of data and need low-latency connections, like autonomous cars and manufacturing services.
Despite the hype over 5G, the EU cybersecurity agency has cautioned that there are not enough safeguards in place to make sure the new networks will be secure.
Current internet connections that run on 4G mobile networks are already vulnerable to hacking attacks.
There is a “risk of repeating history” with the next generation of much faster networks, ENISA warned. Since 5G will be available to an even larger amount of data-hungry mobile consumers who demand more internet bandwidth, the fallout could be disastrous.
“As mobile plays a huge role in our digital society, assuring our everyday digital infrastructure in support of the economy itself, the stakes are high,” said a new ENISA report published late on Wednesday (28 March).
It cautioned that “the improvements that 5G will bring (more users, more bandwidth etc.) having the same security risks could be extremely dangerous”.
Steve Purser, the agency’s director of operators, told EURACTIV “the current signalling protocols have not been designed with security in mind, making it impossible at this point to implement native/efficient security”.
Current telecoms protocol systems that underpin SMS messaging and phone calls have already proven to be weak. Last year, German operator O2 reported that hackers had preyed on a weakness in the so-called signalling system 7, or SS7, to raid bank accounts belonging to people who accessed their funds from mobile phones.
Telecoms companies have scrambled to patch up security gaps in SS7 and the more advanced Diameter protocol system. But “it is expected that new vulnerabilities will be discovered”, ENISA said.
European telecoms companies are starting to run tests of 5G technology this year. While they gear up to invest huge sums of cash in the new networks, ENISA wants the Commission to earmark public funds to “develop proper protection tools for the private sector”.
ENISA also recommended that the Commission introduce guidelines forcing companies to follow security precautions.
“It might make sense to have EU wide baseline security requirements for telecom providers that must include aspects regarding signalling security,” the agency wrote in its report.
According to a new ENISA survey of 39 European telecoms operators, most companies experience only a small number of cybersecurity attacks every year. Sixty-one percent of companies said they were hit with fewer than ten breaches per year. Seven percent said they suffer more than 100 attacks annually.
But most operators only carry out minimal security measures like routing protection to stop hackers who target SMS messages.
ENISA recommended that companies need to do more as attacks become more complex. “Basic measures only cover basic attacks”, the agency warned.
The agency also suggested that national telecoms regulators in EU countries consider how laws could be changed “so that signalling security should be covered in terms of reporting incidents and adopting minimum security requirements”.
China’s Maritime Silk Road projects pose strategic challenges to the South Asian countries that lie astride the route between Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
By Sinderpal Singh*
China’s maritime Silk Road (MSR) projects in South Asia are spread out in the area between Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Collectively, they pose different strategic challenges to India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and the Maldives.
The MSR in South Asia has to be seen within the broader context of the strategic competition between India and China. Given the divergent interests of the five South Asian countries, the growth of the MSR in the region is not likely to be plain-sailing.
Different Strategic Challenges
Pakistan plays a pivotal role in China’s MSR scheme. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a key project within China’s Belt Road Initiative (BRI) and serves as the crucial link between the maritime ‘road’ and land based ‘belt’ aspects of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
The Pakistani port of Gwadar, built, financed and operated by China is located at the confluence of the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, providing China access to a key location in the Indian Ocean. The land route between Gwadar and Kashgar in China’s western Xinjiang province connects the ‘road’ and ‘belt’ elements of the CPEC.
China has made huge financial commitments to the CPEC project which has been largely welcomed by the Pakistani leadership as a means of boosting Pakistan’s economy, grounded in their “all-weather” bilateral relationship. More recently, however, there has been a significant amount of unease within sections in Pakistan about the long-term benefits of the CPEC and the creeping erosion of sovereignty to China. Specifically, there has been concern about Pakistan’s debt burden arising from the CPEC.
In addition, reports of China wanting Chinese currency to be used in the Gwadar free-port area as well as China’s apparent move to talk directly to separatist rebels in Pakistan’s restive Baluchistan region has sparked concern about Pakistan’s dependency status within the China-Pakistan relationship.
BRI as Major Threat?
India views the MSR and China’s broader BRI as a major threat to Indian security and its broader strategic interests. It has three broad concerns. The first set of concerns relate directly to the CPEC and the Chinese military playing a larger role within Pakistan.
There is little doubt in Delhi about Chinese aims to deploy Gwadar in the medium to long term as a dual use port, allowing the PLA key access into the Indian Ocean as well as bolstering Pakistan’s ability to deter any Indian advantage in the naval realm.
The second concern is the ‘hardwiring’ of the strategic choices of regional countries which are part of the MSR. Indian policy makers view the link between increasing indebtedness to China and the latter’s growing influence over the foreign and even domestic policies of these states in highly negative terms.
Lastly, India considers China’s MSR projects in South Asia as part of its larger strategy of challenging Indian primacy in the Indian Ocean. Maintaining Indian primacy in the Indian Ocean has become a key strategic objective in recent years and any Chinese attempt to enlarge its influence in the Indian Ocean is seen as a direct threat to one of India’s core strategic interests.
Correcting Ties with China
Sri Lanka has leveraged growing ties with China against its sometimes difficult relationship with India. Under the previous Rajapakse government, many in India perceived a significant swing towards China, as China made large loans available for infrastructural building as part of China’s MSR.
The Hambantota port on Sri Lanka’s southern coast was the most distinct symbol of large infrastructure projects financed with Chinese loans. The change in government in Sri Lanka in 2015 signalled a move away from the earlier perceived swing towards China.
However, the current government is facing a large debt burden due to Chinese loans to develop infrastructure in Sri Lanka. In 2017, the Sri Lankan government, reeling from its debt servicing burden, agreed to sell a 70 percent stake in the Hambantota port to a Chinese state-owned enterprise for 99 years.
Like Pakistan, there is concern about Sri Lanka losing control of a port on its own coast and China deploying it as a dual-use port. To address such concerns, specifically Indian concerns, Sri Lanka’s government has given public assurances that it will not allow the port to be used for military purposes.
Balancing China
Bangladesh balances its relationship with China and India very carefully and has also been at the forefront of initiatives to encourage India-China co-operation. The Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM) Economic Corridor began life as the ‘Kunming Initiative’ in 1999 and envisages road and rail links between northeast India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and southwest China.
This initiative has now stalled largely because of India’s deep trepidations about the BCIM being part of China’s BRI as well as broader tensions between India and China. In this context, Bangladesh has accepted huge Chinese financing in the form of loans and other agreements relating to about 28 development projects totalling more than US$20 billion.
Mindful of the possible long-term debt to China, Bangladesh has accepted a Japanese bid to build a port at Matarbari while putting on hold Chinese plans to construct a similar container port on Sonadia Island. The current Bangladeshi government is worried that its hedging strategy between India and China could possibly be compromised by its participation in the MSR.
Pre-emptive Intervention?
In Maldives a change of government has led to a change in its approach towards India-China competition in the region. In 2013, the new government cancelled an earlier privatisation award to an Indian company to develop Maldives’s international airport. This was followed by an agreement with China to build infrastructure connecting the airport and a port on the atoll of Laamu.
China is deeply involved in the development and expansion of Maldives’s international airport through loans from the EXIM Bank of China, while Chinese tourists have become the single largest group to visit the Maldives. Indian concerns about the scale of Chinese involvement in Maldives’s infrastructure development have led to some within India’s strategic community to even suggest Indian intervention to effect regime change in India’s favour.
It is clear that India’s concerns about the MSR has led to heightened strategic competition between India and China within the South Asian littoral. South Asian states involved in the MSR have had varying levels of concerns about the financial and sovereignty implications of the MSR. Taken together, these portend significant challenges for China’s MSR within the South Asian littoral.
*Sinderpal Singh is a Senior Fellow with the South Asia program at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.
A two-year long cybercrime investigation between the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organised Crime and terrorism – Central Structure, Romanian National Police, the Prosecution Office of Milan and the Italian National Police, with the support of Eurojust, Europol and its Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce, has led to the arrest of 20 suspects in a series of coordinated raids on 28 March.
Nine individuals were detained in Romania and 11 were arrested in Italy for banking fraud that netted EUR 1 million from hundreds of customers of two major banking institutions. The Romanian authorities have conducted 15 house searches involving 120 Romanian police officers, while the Italian authorities carried out 9 home and computer searches, involving more than 100 Italian police officers. Documents, IT devices, drugs and other materials were seized in Romania and Italy.
The organised crime group (OCG), comprised of Romanian and Italian nationals, used spear phishing e-mails impersonating tax authorities to harvest the online banking credentials of their victims.
While the most common phishing scams generate millions of generic e-mails, spear phishing e-mails are personally addressed to targeted stakeholders with content to make them appear to be sent from a reputable source, such as a bank. Recipients are encouraged to click on a link, which will lead to a fake version of a legitimate website from which their account or contact details can be stolen.
The investigation, initiated in 2016, uncovered how the criminals used the stolen online banking credentials to surreptitiously transfer money from the victims’ accounts into accounts under their control, and from there withdrew the money from ATMs in Romania with credit/debit cards linked to the criminal accounts.
The highly organised OCG pursued its criminal activity using encrypted chat applications. It established its power by applying intimidating and punitive methods towards affiliates and competitors. The OCG is also suspected of money laundering, drug and human trafficking, prostitution and participation in a criminal organisation.
During the investigation, Europol supported the case by providing tailored intelligence analysis and expertise to the investigators and deploying mobile offices on the action day to both countries. Several coordination and operational meetings took place prior to the action at Eurojust and Europol.
Eurojust ensured close cooperation and coordination among the prosecuting and investigating authorities in both Romania and Italy. During two coordination meetings held at Eurojust in March and October 2017, decisions were taken to facilitate the execution of coordinated actions with simultaneous arrests and searches, prevent a conflict of jurisdiction (ne bis in idem issue), continue the parallel investigations and exchange of information, and organise a coordinated action day.
On March 28, a coordination center was set up at Eurojust, facilitating the exchange of information between the involved countries and providing a final global overview of the results.
Due to the demanding investigative measures run on an international level, the Romanian and Italian judicial authorities requested the establishment of a joint investigation team (JIT), which was set up in March 2017 between Italy and Romania with the assistance of Eurojust. Eurojust also facilitated the funding process of the JIT. The JIT allowed for efficient cooperation and coordination, including the continued exchange of information and evidence between Italy and Romania.
A 76-year old Buddhist monk living on his own in his forest monastery in North-eastern Thailand has appealed for international help after receiving death threats from illegal loggers according to a report in Bangkok Post.
In neighbouring Cambodia, monks who are mobilizing under the banner of ‘Independent Monk Network for Social Justice’ have regularly put their lives in danger in fighting illegal logging operators who sometimes have the protection of government officials. They also spoke out July 2016 in an appeal via the German television network Deutsche Welle (DW).
The Germans were given access to film a workshop the monks conducted near Prey Lang – one of Cambodia’s largest and evergreen woodlands. In the workshop the monks taught the local people how to use social media to protect themselves and the forests. Large parts of the forest has already disappeared paving the way for plantations and those that remains, illegal loggers are at work cutting tree after tree as government agencies that are supposed to protect the environment turn a blind eye.
In Thailand’s Si Songhram district, illegal loggers are threatening to cut down trees in a forest that has over 1,000 old trees, which is ironically a part of a royal project to promote conservation. The monk, Luang Pu Kittiphong Kittisophon, abbot of Wat Pa Kham Sawang temple in Tambon Nakham has formally petitioned the local authorities asking them to help save the forest surrounding his temple that has over 1,000 Siamese Rosewood trees that are believed to be 2 to 3 centuries old.
The monk wants the provincial governor to step in to protect the trees, and has also called upon the local media to help him fight the logging gangs after shots were fire at night into a hut near to his own. He believes this is a warning for him to leave the forest temple so that the loggers can have their way.
Both in Thailand and Cambodia rural monks often “ordain” trees, chanting and wrapping them with the yellow robes so that devout Buddhists will not touch them. The ceremonies are large and well publicized in a hope to discourage loggers who might not want to make the bad karma of cutting down the forest around an ordained tree. But the greedy loggers and corrupt government officials – who sometimes include law enforcement officials – have no respect for such religious traditions.
In Cambodia – which has one of the world’s highest de-forestation rates – Buddhist monk Buntenh who has been a monk for 16 years, told DW that he is trying to convince the people that the world cannot exist without trees. “The people who cut down the forest think they are superior, but in reality they are stupid. Only the forest is superior,” he argues. “No one has told me that I should go out there to protect the forest, but for me it was a logical thing to do. I am doing all I can to save it. I plant new trees, I help the people who live from the forest, I am reminding the government of the promises they’ve made.”
Bhikku Buntenh’s network consists of over 5,000 monks, and they believe that saving the forests needs to be fought with the same passion and determination as the fight for independence against the French in the 1950s. But, this time they may have to fight their own government that is indifferent to the environmental concerns of the people.
In Cambodia, Buddhism has undergone a miraculous revival after it was almost destroyed by the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s. Today over 90 percent of the people consider themselves as Buddhists and the orange-robed monks enjoy great respect.
Thus, as activists they enjoy a certain amount of protection from government crackdowns against civil society protest groups. As Bhikku Buntenh told DW, the monks are speaking out because it is the peoples’ right to live in a healthy environment with trees and nature. It is what their religion also encourages.
Cambodian strongman, Prime Minister Hun Sen has spoken publicly in support of the monks’ concerns and he even gave the police permission to use rocket launchers and helicopters in the fight against illegal logging. The monks, however, remain sceptical.
Meanwhile in the Buddhist kingdom Thailand, following Bhikku Kittisophon’s petition to the provincial governor Somchai, he has visited the temple accompanied by local police, military and forest protection officials to discuss with the monk measures to protect him and the surrounding forests.
In 2017, the 120-rai forest has become part of a forest protection project implemented by the Royal Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, but the monk has told the Bangkok Post that although he has complained to the local police about logging activities there, no serious attempt has been made by the police to deal with he logging gangsters. Instead the loggers have made threats against the monk, which made him to go public regarding the issue.
The governor has asked the rural community to work with the local authorities to share information to fight the loggers and emphasized the importance of the local community taking an active role to save the environment.
In Asian Buddhism, forests have been a tangible part of Buddhist practices for centuries. The monks see the forest as one of their closest connections to the teachings of the Buddha. The Buddha spent over 6 years in the forests of India gathering wisdom, and was enlightened under the Bodhi tree. For centuries monastics have used the forests as a way to truly understanding the Buddhist path and the spiritual well being of the population.
But, in the modern world of greedy consumerism, these monks need international support in identifying the perpetrators of these environmental vandalism, who are usually foreign companies working in tow with corrupt local politicians and government officials, and perhaps mounting international campaigns to boycott their products – some of the forests are cut for palm oil plantations – and businesses. International organisations and media could also help to name and shame corrupt politicians, whom the local monks may not be able to do.
