In response to the withdrawal of the United States on Tuesday from the United Nations body which is designed to promote and protect human rights around the globe, Secretary-General António Guterres said that he would have “much preferred” the US remain.

In a statement issued by Spokesman Stéphane Dujarric, the UN chief said that the Geneva-based Human Rights Council was a part of the UN’s overall “Human Rights architecture”, which “plays a very important role in the promotion and protection of human rights worldwide.”

The Human Rights Council is a 47-member inter-governmental body within the UN system, that not only seeks to promote and protect human rights, but also addresses alleged rights violations and makes recommendations on them.

It’s a forum for discussing all thematic human rights issues and situations that require its attention, throughout the year. The members are elected by the UN General Assembly.

“The Secretary-General would have much preferred for the United States to remain in the Human Rights Council,” said the statement on Tuesday night.

The US announced its decision shortly beforehand, when according to news reports, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley appeared together with Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. They accused the Council of displaying entrenched bias against Israel, and criticized what they said was the body’s willingness to admit nations which were themselves human rights abusers.

Ambassador Haley, according to reports, noted that the move did not signify in any way, that the US was retreating from its own human rights commitments.

By Nick Cunningham

The U.S. dollar has jumped to its strongest level in nearly a year, raising questions about how a strong greenback could act as a drag on debt and oil demand in much of the world.

The U.S. Federal Reserve announced another rate hike a few days ago, which helped edge up the dollar to a new high for the year.

The greenback has “a little room to run,” Kathy Jones, a New York-based chief fixed-income strategist at Charles Schwab, said in a Bloomberg interview. “We have seen softer numbers out of Europe and firmer numbers out of the U.S.” The U.S. Federal Reserve is unwinding its extraordinary monetary intervention after a decade of near-zero interest rates. The Fed has announced quarter-point interest rate hikes twice and is planning on at least two additional increases this year.

Meanwhile, the European Central Bank is heading in the other direction in an effort to keep sovereign bond yields from spiraling out of control, particularly after the recent political turmoil in Italy unnerved bond markets on the continent. The ECB said it would keep interest rates low through at least next summer.

The diverging policy paths for the two central banks points to a further strengthening of the dollar relative to the euro. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index jumped to 1,187 in early trading on Friday, the highest level since July 2017. The greenback has strengthened about 6 percent in the past two months.

“(ECB President Mario) Draghi came out a little bit more dovish than people thought he was going to be. And that really caused the euro to take a dip and the (U.S.) dollar to go up, which is putting downward pressure on prices,” Phil Flynn, analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago, told Reuters.

There are plenty of factors influencing oil prices right now, and the OPEC+ decision expected in a few days will be the single most important driver in the near-term. But the U.S. dollar is one important variable influencing oil prices. A stronger dollar helps push down prices because it makes oil, which is priced in dollars, much more expensive in much of the world.

Moreover, emerging markets now account for a majority of oil demand, and nearly all of the growth in oil demand. More specifically, additional consumption over the next few decades is expected to overwhelmingly come from China and India. In 2018, the two countries have accounted for nearly 70 percent of oil demand growth.

As a result, actions from the Fed reverberate through the oil markets. Higher oil prices act as a drag on demand, but a stronger greenback magnifies the expense in local currency.

Some governments are desperate to shield their economies from higher prices. As Reuters notes, the price of a liter of diesel in India is up 27 percent from a year ago, which, while costly, is actually subdued given the 70 percent increase in Brent prices over that time period. The Indian government is stepping in to blunt the impact of higher fuel prices, at great expense to public coffers.

The IEA said last week that oil demand is set to grow by 1.4 million barrels per day (mb/d) in each of 2018 and 2019, although that forecast was vulnerable to several potential pitfalls. “Of course, there are downside risks: these include the possibility of higher prices, a weakening of economic confidence, trade protectionism and a potential further strengthening of the US dollar,” the IEA wrote.

We have already seen some flashpoints flare up this year as a result of both higher fuel prices and currency problems, and while there are always multiple causes to such events, the strength of the U.S. dollar cannot be discounted. In Argentina, the peso lost nearly a quarter of its value relative to the dollar, forcing the government to seek a financial rescue from the IMF. In Brazil, crippling protests over high fuel prices paralyzed the country – prices were particularly painful for the truckers staging the strikes because Brazil’s currency lost nearly 15 percent of its value relative to the dollar, exacerbating the rise in oil prices.

“Currency risks are also mounting for several emerging market economies and some OECD countries,” the IEA wrote in its report. “For example, between the start of April and the end of May, the Argentinian peso has depreciated by 24% versus the US Dollar, the Brazilian real by 12.6%, the Mexican peso by 9.7%, the Russian ruble by 9.2%, the Turkish lira by 14.4%, the South African rand by 7.3% and the euro by 5.4%.”

This currency turmoil threatens oil demand growth. “These depreciations forced some countries to increase interest rates to defend their currency, which could weigh on growth in due course,” the IEA concluded.

Source: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Fed-Is-Driving-Down-Oil-Prices.html

Saudi authorities have arrested two more women’s rights activists in recent days in what appears to be an unrelenting crackdown on the women’s rights movement, Human Rights Watch said. Saudi activists have reported that the authorities have placed travel bans on numerous others since May 15.

On June 6, Saudi authorities arrested the writer and activist Nouf Abdelaziz, who had publicly expressed solidarity with three women’s rights activists arrested in May, along with at least 14 other activists and supporters. On June 10, the authorities arrested Mayaa al-Zahrani, an activist and friend of Abdelaziz, after she reportedly posted a letter Abdelaziz asked her to make public in case of her arrest. In the letter, addressed to her fellow Saudis, Abdelaziz explained who she was, stressing that she committed no crime: “I am not a provoker, not a vandalizer, not a terrorist, a criminal or a traitor… I have never been [anything] but a good citizen who loves her country and wishes for it nothing but the best.” Both women are being held incommunicado.

“The Saudi government appears determined to leave its citizens without any space to show even rhetorical support for activists jailed in this unforgiving crackdown on dissent,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Nouf Abdelaziz and Mayaa al-Zahrani’s only ‘crime’ seems to be expressing solidarity with their fellow imprisoned activists.”

On June 4, the local newspaper Okaz reported that nine detained activists, four women and five men, will soon be referred to the Specialized Criminal Court, which was originally established to try detainees held in connection with terrorism offenses, to be tried for committing three “serious” crimes: “cooperating with entities hostile to the kingdom,” “recruiting persons in a sensitive government agency to obtain confidential information to harm the interests of the kingdom,” and “providing financial and moral support to hostile elements abroad.”

Okaz earlier reported that, 15 days into the activists’ detention, an investigating body had announced that all nine detainees had confessed to the latter two accusations. If convicted, they could face up to 20 years in prison.

Among those arrested are the prominent women’s rights activists Loujain al-Hathloul, Eman al-Nafjan, and Aziza al-Yousef; Ibrahim al-Modaimeegh, a lawyer; Mohammad al-Rabea, an activist; and Abdulaziz al-Meshaal, a philanthropist. They face charges similar to those against several imprisoned activists currently serving lengthy prison terms, including Waleed Abu al-Khair, Fadil al-Manasif, and Nadhir al-Majed. Immediately following their arrest, in a coordinated campaign, local media outlets publicly accused those detained of treason.

The recent crackdown on women’s rights activists comes just weeks ahead of the much-anticipated lifting of the driving ban on women on June 24 – an occasion several of the currently detained activists had long campaigned to bring about. Saudi authorities arrested Abdelaziz and al-Zahrani just as Saudi Arabia’s Information Ministry began distributing video footage and photos of women proudly displaying their new drivers’ licenses.

On May 29, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) issued a statement calling on Saudi Arabia to immediately release all recently detained activists “if, as it appears, their detention is related solely to their work as human rights defenders and activists on women’s issues.” In a strongly-worded resolution published on May 30, the European Parliament condemned the “ongoing repression of human rights defenders, including women’s rights defenders, in Saudi Arabia” and called on the Saudi government to “put an end to all forms of harassment, including at the judicial level,” against them.

Human Rights Watch has documented Saudi Arabia’s use of its Specialized Criminal Court and counterterrorism law to unjustly prosecute human rights defenders, writers, and peaceful critics.

Following a five-day visit to Saudi Arabia in 2017, the former UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism, Ben Emmerson, concluded in his report published on June 6, 2018, that Saudi Arabia had misused its counter-terrorism measures to stifle political dissent, suppress opposition, and silence peaceful critics. Emmerson provided a detailed overview of the nature of the Specialized Criminal Court, where local media reports say that the currently detained activists will be tried. He included sections on the use of torture and coerced confessions, as well as on pre-trial detentions and flawed investigations.

“It is imperative for Saudi Arabia’s Western allies to speak out in solidarity with the detained activists and to pressure the Saudi authorities to unconditionally release those detained for their work as human rights activists before they are referred for trial,” Whitson said. “There can be no real celebration on June 24 while the women who campaigned for the right to drive and their supporters remain behind bars.”

By Hadi Azmi

Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said Tuesday his government had a near perfect case against predecessor Najib Razak over the alleged theft of state money, while a source told BenarNews that Malaysia’s anti-graft agency had proposed criminal charges against the ex-PM.

The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) proposed charging Najib under the anti-money laundering act and for misappropriating properties in connection with a financial scandal around the 1MDB state fund, sources close to the case said. The MACC presented an investigation paper to Malaysia’s new attorney general last week.

“The proposal on the charges never changed, it is the same as the one we proposed to then- Attorney General Apandi (Ali),” a source who was not authorized to speak to the media told BenarNews.

The investigation paper sent on June 12 focused on 42 million ringgit (U.S. $10.6 million) that was allegedly transferred from SRC International, a subsidiary of 1Malaysia Development Berhad, to Najib’s personal bank account.

Serving as prime minister when the SRC investigation began in 2015, Najib sacked then-Attorney General Abdul Gani Patail who was preparing a case against him. Gani’s replacement, Apandi, subsequently cleared Najib of all wrongdoing in relation to 1MDB and SRC.

A source said MACC was working on two other investigation papers into 2.6 billion ringgit ($650 million) in SRC money that ended up in Najib’s account.

Najib became the focus as Malaysia’s new government pledged to investigate the 1MDB scandal and other major cases involving corruption in its first 100 days after upsetting the former prime minister’s Barisan Nasional coalition in last month’s general election.

Since Mahathir was sworn in as prime minister on May 10, police said they had raided properties linked to Najib and confiscated 114 million ringgit ($28.75 million), along with 284 boxes containing luxury handbags.

U.S. Department of Justice officials have described the 1MDB case as “the worst kleptocracy scandal in recent times,” pointing out that more than $4.5 billion (17.9 billion ringgit) was stolen from the fund since its inception by Najib in 2009 until its advisory board was dissolved in 2016.

“We think that we already have almost a perfect case,” Mahathir told Reuters news service.

Najib played a central role in the scandal, Mahathir said.

“He was totally responsible for 1MDB. Nothing can be done without his signature, and we have his signature on all the deals entered into by 1MDB. Therefore, he is responsible,” Mahathir told the news agency.

In response, Najib denied doing anything wrong and added that even if he had given orders at 1MDB, the management and fund board would not have been bound to act. “As far as I am concerned, I did not do anything that I thought was illegal,” he told Reuters.

The statement was consistent with Najib’s previous denials involving 1MDB.

Mahathir also confirmed that Najib’s wife, Rosmah Mansor, was being investigated.

“Some of the money is believed to have gone to her, lots of money,” Mahathir told Reuters. “We know about this, but finding the paper trail is a bit more difficult in this case because she doesn’t sign any papers. Najib signs a lot of papers.”

Both Najib and Rosmah have been questioned by MACC as part of its investigation into SRC International.

Attorney general’s priority

When he was appointed as Malaysia’s attorney general on June 6, Tommy Thomas declared that 1MDB would be his top priority.

He said his office would need time to review the investigation paper but it appreciated “the urgency and sensitivity of their task.” He said he had appointed two teams to study the paper, one to consider instituting criminal prosecution and another to consider civil proceedings.

“Members of both teams are experienced deputy public prosecutors and senior federal counsels who will report directly to me,” he said.

In related developments, MACC officials earlier this month ordered businessman Low Taek Jho, better known as Jho Low, and SRC director Nik Faisal Ariff Kamil to contact them immediately to assist in the 1MDB investigation.

Home Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said authorities had sufficient information that Jho Low was among the main suspects behind the 1MDB scandal.

The government also sought Interpol’s assistance in locating the men and issued arrest warrants, according to media reports.

“They are super important to the investigation,” MACC deputy commissioner Azam Baki said at the time.

Jho Low, identified as a close friend of Najib, agreed to assist, his attorney said in a statement in response to the order.

Later, reports surfaced that the fugitive financier sought a deal from the Malaysian government where he would give up his claim to assets valued at more than 4 billion ringgit ($1 billion) in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

In his interview with Reuters, Mahathir said he had turned down Jho Low’s offer and would not consider any similar deal with Najib.

2.6 billion people – a third of the world’s population – live in countries where democracy is in retreat, according to a new study based on the largest dataset on democracy, published in Democratization. The research also found that only 15 per cent of people globally live in places where women and lower income groups have at least somewhat equal access to power.

A team of political scientists, led by Dr Anna Lührmann of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, tested the health of global democracy using the latest update of the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset. V-Dem, which includes assessments from more than 3,000 democracy experts in 202 countries, is the most comprehensive database of its kind.

The study revealed that in 2017 democratic qualities were in decline in 24 countries across the world, including some of the most populous, such as the USA and India. When weighted by the population size of each country, the analysis showed that levels of democracy are falling for one third of people worldwide.

While the most visible feature of democracy – the election – remains strong and is even improving in some countries, the non-electoral aspects of democracy, such as media freedom, freedom of expression and the rule of law, are increasingly under threat. In the last six years, there has been a particularly steep decline in liberal democracy, with Western Europe and North America back to levels last seen nearly 40 years ago.

Even in democracies, some sections of the population – typically women, some social groups, and the less wealthy – are systematically disadvantaged when it comes to access to political power. At least somewhat equal access in terms of gender and socio-economic status is found in countries that together are home to only 15 per cent of the world’s population.

Political exclusion based on socioeconomic status is also becoming increasingly severe, the analysis revealed. Over the past decade, the wealthy have gained significantly more power in countries which are home to 1.9 billion people in total – a quarter of the world’s population.

Dr. Lührmann said: “Media autonomy, freedom of expression, and the rule of law have undergone the greatest declines among democracy metrics in recent years. This worrisome trend makes elections less meaningful across the world.”

By John Everington

Saudi Arabian equites are poised to attract up to $40 billion worth of foreign inflows, following a landmark decision by index provider MSCI to include the Kingdom’s stocks in its widely tracked Emerging Markets index.

“MSCI will include the MSCI Saudi Arabia Index in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, representing on a pro forma basis a weight of approximately 2.6% of the index with 32 securities, following a two-step inclusion process,” the MSCI said in a statement late on Wednesday night Riyadh time.

“Saudi Arabia’s inclusion in MSCI’s EM Index is a milestone achievement and will likely bring with it significant levels of foreign investment,” Salah Shamma, head of investment for MENA at Franklin Templeton Emerging Markets Equity, told Arab News.

“It is a recognition of the progress Saudi Arabia has made in implementing its ambitious capital markets transformation agenda. The halo effect of such a move will be felt across the stock exchanges of the entire Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).”

Market authorities in Saudi Arabia have introduced a series of reforms in the past 18 months to bring local capital markets more in line with international norms, including lower restrictions on international investors, and the introduction of short-selling and T+2 settlement cycles.

Such reforms prompted index provider FTSE Russell to upgrade the Kingdom to emerging market status in March, opening the country’s stocks up to billions worth of passive and active inflows from foreign investors.

MSCI’s Emerging Market index is tracked by about $2 trillion in active and global funds. The inclusion of Saudi stocks in the index, alongside FTSE Russell’s upgrade, is forecast to attract as much as $45 billion of foreign inflows from passive and active investors, according to estimates from Egyptian investment bank EFG Hermes.

The upgrade announcement was widely expected by the region’s investment community, following a similar emerging markets upgrade announcement by fellow index provider FTSE Russell in March.

“MSCI index inclusion will be a historic milestone for the Saudi market as it will allow for sticky institutional money to make an entry in 2019 which will help deepen the market,” said John Sfakianakis, director of economic research at the Gulf Research Center in Riyadh.

For the millions of Americans who work “nonstandard” shifts – evenings, nights or with rotating days off – the schedule can be especially challenging with children at home.

But a new study from the University of Washington finds that consistent hours, at whatever time of day, can give families flexibility and in some cases, improve children’s behavior.

The study, first made available online in December 2017 before being published in the June issue of the Journal of Family Issues, focuses on two-parent families in which one parent works a nonstandard shift, hours that are common in health care, law enforcement and the service sector.

The study finds that the impacts of parent work schedules on children vary by age and gender, and often reflect which shift a parent works. Rotating shifts — a schedule that varies day by day or week by week — can be most problematic for children.

“Workers often struggle to carve out the work/life balance they want for themselves, and in dual-earner families, balancing partners’ schedules remains an issue for many families,” said Christine Leibbrand, a graduate student in the UW department of sociology and author of the study. “Parents are facing these decisions of balancing work and caring for their children.”

There are conflicting figures on the number of people who work nonstandard shifts. In 2004, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted nearly 15 million such workers, up from 14.5 million in 2001, when one in seven people worked a nonstandard schedule. A 2014 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated as many as one in four Americans worked a night shift. Increasingly, other factors may influence who works when: rapidly changing technology affecting many industries, the increase in working remotely, and the growing gig economy.

Nonstandard schedules, especially for single-parent and lower-income families, are associated with behavior problems among children, according to past research.

To add to that research, Leibbrand examined data on two-parent households in which one parent worked a nonstandard shift. On this, she was inspired in part by her own family: a sibling who’s a nurse, another a firefighter, both with children.

Using information from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which started following a group of nearly 13,000 individuals in 1979, and its Child Supplement, which started following the children of those individuals in 1986, Leibbrand analyzed parents’ work schedules against their periodic reports of their children’s behavior. Child behavior (covering ages 5 to 15) was ascertained from a 28-question survey that covers issues such as anxiety, aggression and getting along with peers. Those results receive a Behavioral Problems Index score — the higher the score, the more problems a child is reported to have.

The tradition is represented as noble, the confiding link between confessor and penitent, a bridge never to be broken, even under pain of death. Taken that way, the confessional is brandished as the Catholic Church’s great weapon against the wiles and predations of secular power. The State shall have no say where the priest’s confidence is concerned, for all may go to him to seek amends. “The sacramental seal,” goes the relevant code of canon law, “is inviolable; therefore it is absolutely forbidden for the confessor to betray in any way a penitent in words or in any manner and for any reason.”

Those points certainly have merits, even if these seem a touch faded after the sex abuse imbroglio the Church has found itself in. Confession, which functions as a barometric reading of Catholic guilt, has developed its own succour and relish, an ecosystem of ritual and understanding resistant to the prying of the criminal law. Not merely does its ironclad protection provide a dispensation from the laws of the land in certain troubling cases; the confession, in effect, serves as an economy of ordered guilt, reassurance for the next binge of sin. To remove it, or at the very least heavily qualify it, would be an unsettling challenge to a distinct Weltanschauung.

The process effectively permits all – including erring priests – to engage the process from either side of the grille. Historically, the process also imperilled children. Pope Pius X, in decreeing in 1910 that confession should commence at the tender age of seven, permitted an army of celibates access to vulnerable, an in certain instances titillating flesh.

Legislators troubled by the enduring force and fascination with the seal of the confessional have gotten busy, most notably in Australia. This was prompted, in no small part, by the findings and recommendations of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. “We are satisfied,” went the Australian report, “that confession is a forum where Catholic children have disclosed their sexual abuse and where clergy have disclosed their abusive behaviour in order to deal with their own guilt.”

One recommendation specifies that institutions “which have a religious confession for children should implement a policy that requires the rite only to be conducted in an open space within the clear line of sight of another adult.” But the members of the Royal Commission went beyond the spatial logistics of the confessional. Institutional jolting was required.

Each state and territory government, argued Commission members, should pass legislation creating “a criminal offence of failure to report targeted at child sexual abuse in an institutional context”. This, it was suggested, would extend to “knowledge gained or suspicions that are or should have been formed, in whole or in part, on the basis of information disclosed in or in connection with a religious confession.” The law would also exclude existing excuses, protections or privileges.

Despite treading delicately, such recommendations were not merely matters for demurral by the Church, but considerations to be sneered at from the summit of spiritual snobbery. President of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference and Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart reduced the matter to one of neat sophistry veiled by religious freedom. “Confession in the Catholic Church,” he reasoned in August last year, “is a spiritual encounter with God through the priest” being “a fundamental part of the freedom of religion”.

Hart’s protestations did not go heeded in the South Australian legislature, making it the first in Australia to legally oblige priests to report confessions of child abuse from October 1. Omitting to do so will result in a fine of $10,000. Bishop of Port Pirie and acting Adelaide Archbishop Greg O’Kelly, much in Hart’s vein, saw the move as having “much wider implications for the Catholic Church and the practice of the faith.” Such comments could only come across as archaic and insensitive, given the conviction of his predecessor, Archbishop Philip Wilson, for concealing child sex abuse.

More to the point, the remarks by Bishop O’Kelly are brazenly selfish, permitting the priest an all-exclusive gold card for reasons of amendment, “that the penitent actually is sincere about wanting forgiveness, is sincere about anting reparation”. The conspicuous absentee here is the victim, always abstracted, if not totally hidden, by matters of the spirit.

While accounts such as John Cornwell’s, whose stingingly personal The Dark Box makes the sensible point that abolishing the confession and its lusty pull would essentially address the problem, the Church is already finding fewer penitents. In a sense, it is already losing the appeal, the allure, and even the danger, of the confessional. Musty physical convention has given way to digital releases and outpouring. Social media, crowned by the confessional fetish that is Facebook, takes the disturbed soul and expresses it to the globe.

From the vacuity of the Kardashian phenomenon to the newly enlisted grandparent keen to reflect on banal deeds, these platforms have stolen an irresistible march on those in the land of Catholicity. Such confessions of sin or achievement – the distinctions are not always clear – have become the preserve of Mark Zuckerberg and his technicians, rather than a local priest desperate to remain relevant. But that age old resistance against the laws of the civic secular domain remains the Church of Rome’s stubborn, practised specialty. The elusive spirit, in dialogue with an unverified Sky God, continues to be its invaluable alibi for crimes of the flesh.

Elephanta Island aka Gharapuri is in the news and for all the wrong reasons. That the Elephanta Island, known for housing UNESCO World Heritage Site Elephanta Caves and receives more than 20 lakh footfalls of tourists annually, was shrouded in darkness every night for years on end – 70 in all – dashing all hopes and aspirations of progress for the 1,200 islanders living in three villages on the island didn’t quite qualify as news for the mainstream media. That the island lay barely 10 kms from India’s financial capital Mumbai yet lay cursed with despair only underlined the ludicrousness of the situation brought about primarily by political apathy at local levels as well as state. The government at the Centre couldn’t have cared lesser.

Ironically, over the years, not a single NGO or member of Civil Society felt it was important to campaign for rights of locals or against gross violations of basic constitutional guarantees, of the Right to Equality – Article 14 and the Right to Life as assured by Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. Nor did the mainstream media find it important enough to highlight the same. After all, it was an issue that affected a small section of people and 1,200 islanders didn’t have much political beef to bargain for their own rights.

However, all of that has changed. After seven decades of India’s Independence, in February 2018, the island was delivered power through India’s longest 7.5 km long undersea cable. The electrification project cost Rs 25 crore and took Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Limited about 15 months to complete. The undersea power cable, when readied, took around three months to lay. In each of the three villages of Elephanta Island, a transformer has been installed along with six streetlight towers each 13-metre tall with six powerful LED bulbs providing individual power meter connections to 200 domestic and a few commercial consumers.

In a function held at the island, social reformer Appasaheb Dharmadhikari formally switched on the power supply. The function was attended by Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, ministers Chandrashekhar Bawankule, Jaykumar Raval, Ravindra, and other dignitaries. The task of electrifying Elephanta Island was a step towards Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s prized target to electrify the whole of India within 1,000 days – a target met within just 987 days with Leisang in Manipur becoming the last village to be added to the national power grid on April 28th, 2018.

The Prime Minister described it as a “new beginning of a period of development” for the 1,200 people involved in fishing, farming, boat repairs and tourism-related activities. “There is no greater contentment and joy than the fact that the lives of the countrymen be full of shine and there be happiness in their lives,” said PM Modi echoing the views of Elephanta Island’s families.

Incidentally, the 22-KV undersea cable has four lines, including one standby line ensuring round-the-clock power to the Islanders with excess capacity to meet requirements for more than 30 years. The cable has been connected directly with the MSEDCL’s Olwa sub-station, Panvel Division in Raigad on the mainland. The cable connection is expected to speed up work on the proposed 8-km long ropeway connecting Mumbai directly with Elephanta Island running above the Arabian Sea. The project planned by the Mumbai Port Trust (MbPT) will be the cynosure of all eyes and directly benefit nearly 20 lakh tourists visiting the island every year. Also, a water filtration plant may be set up to use water from a dam on the 16-sq km island to provide safe and clean drinking water to the locals and tourists.

And now, in May 2018, when the Maharashtra Coastal Zone Management Authority (MCZMA) released the draft Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) maps for Raigad district, environmentalists have gone up in arms. The mangroves areas in Taloja, Kamothe and Gharapuri Island have, in the draft maps, been marked as Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) II — areas that have already been developed up to or close to the shoreline where authorised constructions are allowed — enabling developers to work in the area.

The environmentalists maintain that Gharapuri Island, renowned for its centuries-old Elephanta caves, needs to be preserved as an open space and kept away from any development.

It is alleged that the Devendra Fadnavis-led government is now trying to open up Gharapuri island, also called Elephanta Island, for development. While CRZ-I covers ecologically sensitive areas within 100 metres of the high-tide line where no development is allowed, CRZ-III covers areas within 500 metres of the high-tide line and are considered no-development zones. CRZ-II covers areas within 500 metres of the high-tide line but are already developed; for example, Marine Drive in South Mumbai.

An environmentalist lobby, bolstered by a political opposition, is now all set to oppose the CRZ-II maps by filing ‘detailed objections’ and ‘resist any construction activity’ on the island. “This is a ploy to allow five-star hotels and resorts to come up on the island,” maintains an activist on grounds of anonymity.

“This government has been attempting to further commercial interests while compromising upon local needs and without taking into consideration fragile environmental issues,” she added.

The Islanders are exhilarated with the turn of events and are all braced to hop on the development bandwagon and with good reason. For years, they have been facing a huge survival crisis without power.

For India’s financial capital and neighbour Mumbai, the access to power is a given but for the inhabitants of Elephanta, the deprivation risks their very existence. Scores of islanders have died owing to lack of immediate medical attention in case of crisis such as snake bites, heart attacks even strokes that could well be prevented had there been a vaccine, antidote or an injectable remedy at hand.

Without power and the associated inability to store venom antidotes or blood-thinning drugs used to urgently dissolve clots in case of strokes or heart attacks, the islanders were left with little option but to die. The arrival of electricity on the island changes all of that. Access to clean drinking water, hygiene and safety, education and entertainment closely associated with the Right to Life is now within reach.

It simply makes no sense depriving islanders of the access to a ‘developed’ life, to clean drinking water, to medical aid, to entertainment and education without which their ‘Right to Life’ would be incomplete, even meaningless. The islanders, who have suffered for years on end, are the true stakeholders whose legal rights were deprived by the State for over decades. Constitutionally guaranteed Rights of Equality and Fundamental Rights such as Right to Life and Personal Liberty, Right to Work, Right to Movement and others are now being upheld…finally, by a government that is sensitive and responsible.

A little over a year after assuming the reins of the Catholic League, I started exchanging letters with Newark Archbishop Theodore McCarrick. He was genuinely supportive of our efforts. On October 17, 1994, he wrote to me saying, “I have been speaking to the bishops of New Jersey at our Provincial meeting and encouraging them to support the work of the Catholic League in their own dioceses.”

Now he is bearing a heavy cross. The takeaway for me is clear.

On June 12, I wrote the following: “The problem of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church occurred mostly between 1965 and 1985. Now that it is harder for practicing homosexuals to enter the priesthood—they are responsible for 8 in 10 cases of the sexual abuse of minors (pedophiles are responsible for less than 5 percent)—there is no need for the annual study [of clergy sexual abuse].”

I added that in the last two years, “an average of .005 percent of the clergy had a substantiated charge made against him.” I also credited the training programs and screening procedures instituted by the bishops, saying they should be continued.

How is this relevant to the situation that Cardinal McCarrick is in?

The three key points that I made are: the timeline (1965-1985); the sexual orientation of the molester (most were homosexuals); and the progress that has been made (practicing homosexuals have a harder time becoming priests and efforts to check this problem have worked).

In the case of Cardinal McCarrick, the alleged abuse took place a half century ago (in the 1970s), and the alleged victim was a teenager, thus ruling out pedophilia.

Pray for Cardinal McCarrick and anyone whom he may have hurt.

Lurking in the background of a Saudi-Moroccan spat over World Cup hosting rights and the Gulf crisis is a more fundamental competition for the mantle of spearheading promotion of a moderate interpretation of Islam.

It’s a competition in which history and long-standing religious diplomacy gives Morocco a leg up compared to Saudi Arabia, long a citadel of Sunni Muslim intolerance and ultra-conservatism.

Saudi Arabia is the new, baggage-laden kid on the block with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman asserting that he is returning the kingdom to a top-down, undefined form of moderate Islam.

To be sure, Prince Mohammed has dominated headlines in the last year with long-overdue social reforms such as lifting the ban on women’s driving and loosening restrictions on cultural expression and entertainment.

The crown prince has further bolstered his projection of a kingdom that is putting ultra-conservative social and religious strictures behind it by relinquishing control of Brussels’ Saudi-managed Great Mosque and reports that he is severely cutting back on decades-long, global Saudi financial support for Sunni Muslim ultra-conservative educational, cultural and religious institutions.

Yet, Prince Mohammed has also signalled the limits of his definition of moderate Islam. His recurrent rollbacks have often been in response to ultra-conservative protests not just from the ranks of the kingdom’s religious establishment but also segments of the youth that constitute the mainstay of his popularity.

Just this week, Prince Mohammed sacked Ahmad al-Khatib, the head of entertainment authority he had established. The government gave no reason for Mr. Al-Khatib’s dismissal, but it followed online protests against a controversial Russian circus performance in Riyadh, which included women wearing “indecent clothes.”

The protests were prompted by a video on social media that featured a female performer in a tight pink costume.

In a similar vein, the Saudi sports authority closed a female fitness centre in Riyadh in April over a contentious promotional video that appeared to show a woman working out in leggings and a tank-top. A spokesman for the royal court, Saud al-Qahtani, said the closure was in line with the kingdom’s pursuit of “moderation without moral breakdown.”

Saudi sports czar Turki bin Abdel Muhsin Al-Asheikh said “the gym had its licence suspended over a deceitful video that circulated on social media promoting the gym disgracefully and breaching the kingdom’s code of conduct.”

Mr. Al-Sheikh’s sports authority moreover apologized recently for airing a promotional video of a World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc., event that showed scantily clad female wrestlers drawing euphoric cheers from men and women alike.

To be sure, the United States, which repeatedly saw ultra-conservative Islam as a useful tool during the Cold War, was long supportive of Saudi propagation of Islamic puritanism that also sought to counter the post-1979 revolutionary Iranian zeal.

Nonetheless, Saudi Arabia’s more recent wrestle with what it defines as moderate and effort to rebrand itself contrasts starkly with long-standing perceptions of Morocco as an icon of more liberal interpretations of the faith.

While Saudi Islamic scholars have yet to convince the international community that they have had a genuine change of heart, Morocco has emerged as a focal point for the training of European and African imams in cooperation with national governments.

Established three years ago, Morocco’s Mohammed VI Institute for Imam Training has so far graduated 447 imams; 212 Malians, 37 Tunisians, 100 Guineans, 75 Ivorians, and 23 Frenchmen.

The institute has signed training agreements with Belgium, Russia and Libya and is negotiating understandings with Senegal.

Critics worry that Morocco’s promotion of its specific version of Islam, which fundamentally differs from the one that was long prevalent in Saudi Arabia, still risks Morocco curbing rather than promoting religious diversity.

Albeit on a smaller scale than the Saudi campaign, Morocco has in recent years launched a mosque building program in West Africa as part of its soft power policy and effort to broaden its focus that was long centred on Europe rather than its own continent.

On visits to Africa, King Mohammed VI makes a point of attending Friday prayers and distributing thousands of copies of the Qur’an.

In doing so Morocco benefits from the fact that its religious ties to West Africa date back to the 11^th century when the Berber Almoravid dynast converted the region to Islam. King Mohammed, who prides himself on being a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, retains legitimacy as the region’s ‘Commander of the Faithful.’

West African Sufis continue to make annual pilgrimages to a religious complex in Fez that houses the grave of Sidi Ahmed Tijani, the 18^th century founder of a Sufi order.

All of this is not to say that Morocco does not have an extremism problem of its own. Militants attacked multiple targets in Casablanca in 2003, killing 45 people. Another 17 died eight years later in an attack in Marrakech. Militants of Moroccan descent were prominent in a spate of incidents in Europe in recent years.

Nonetheless, protests in 2011 at the time of the popular Arab revolts and more recently have been persistent but largely non-violent.

Critics caution however that Morocco is experiencing accelerated conservatism as a result of social and economic grievances as well as an education system that has yet to wholeheartedly embrace more liberal values.

“Extremism is gaining ground,” warned Mohamed Elboukili, an academic and human rights activist, pointing to an increasing number of young women who opt to cover their heads.

“You can say to me this scarf doesn’t mean anything. Yes, it doesn’t mean anything, but it’s isolating the girl from the boy. Now she’s wearing the scarf, but later on she’s not going to shake hands with the boy . . . Later on she’s not going to study in the same class with boys. Those are the mechanisms of an Islamist state, that’s how it works,” Mr. Elboukili said.

Mr. Elboukili’s observations notwithstanding, it is Morocco rather than Saudi Arabia that many look to for the promotion of forms of Islam that embrace tolerance and pluralism. Viewed from Riyadh, Morocco to boot has insisted on pursuing an independent course instead of bowing to Saudi dictates.

Morocco refused to support Saudi Arabia in its debilitating, one-year-old economic and diplomatic boycott of Qatar but recently broke off relations with Iran, accusing the Islamic republic of supporting Frente Polisario insurgents in the Western Sahara.

Moroccan rejection of Saudi tutelage poses a potential problem for a man like Prince Mohammed, whose country is the custodian of Islam’s two holiest cities and who has been ruthless in attempting to impose his will on the Middle East and North Africa and position the kingdom as the region’s undisputed leader.

Yet, Saudi Arabia’s ability to compete for the mantle of moderate Islam is likely to be determined in the kingdom itself rather than on a regional stage. And that will take far more change than Prince Mohammed has been willing to entertain until now.

In the state of Georgia’s Glynn County Detention Center, four activists await trial stemming from their nonviolent action, on April 4, 2018, at the Naval Submarine Base, Kings Bay. In all, seven Catholic plowshares activists acted that day, aiming to make real the prophet Isaiah’s command to “beat swords into plowshares.” The Kings Bay is home port to six nuclear armed Trident ballistic missile submarines with the combined explosive power of over 9000 Hiroshima bombs.

This week, five people have gathered for a fast and vigil, near the Naval Base, calling it “Hunger for Nuclear Disarmament.”

Kindly hosts in Brunswick, GA turned over their Air B and B to us. The accommodation is a remodeled garage, – were we not fasting we might find the kitchen a bit crowded, but for us, this week, the accommodations are ideal. Egrets, ospreys and vultures glide overhead. Huge live oaks surround us, looming and beautiful, draped in Spanish moss. Tannins released from the oak trees seep into the nearby river, historically a source of fresh water because the tannins killed the bugs. Centuries ago, colonizers would fill huge containers with “brown” water from the river, water in which the bugs couldn’t survive, and use that water for their drinking needs throughout their voyages back to Europe.

When we travel along the roads, vast stretches of wetlands extend as far as the eye can see. Recent laws mandate conservation of these marshy grounds.

Our small community here longs to preserve all life, to end potential omnicide.

During vigils at the Naval Base, in front of the detention center and at the District Court House, we hold banners, one of which says “Disarm Trident, Love One Another. Steve Baggarly, one of the fasters, carries copies of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, negotiated in July 2017, by 122 nations.  “Most of the world is tired of being held hostage by omnicidal weapons and wants nuclear disarmament,” said Steve. “The U.S. and the 8 other nuclear powers who boycotted the Treaty negotiations are the outliers.” Baggarly added that, “Our true national security lies in achieving the long overdue objective of nuclear disarmament.”

The Kings Bay action was the latest of 100 similar actions taken around the world since 1980 and the first plowshares action to take place since the global treaty banning nuclear weapons was signed.

This afternoon, when we ended our vigil, we visited a small park, opposite an entrance to the base, which marks the site of a sugar factory owned by John Houstoun MacIntosh. The memorial plaque in front of the factory ruins makes it sound as though MacIntosh built the factory and mansion. Hardly the case! In 1825, slaves assuredly constructed the buildings and cultivated the sugar cane, risking their lives in the dangerous process.

Eventually, small groups of abolitionists working to end the slave trade gained momentum. Disarmament activists today draw inspiration from their struggles. “Nuclear weapons are a theft from the poor,” said fast participant Beth Brockman. “People here in Georgia and across the South are in desperate need of the resources squandered on the war economy.”

Two highlights of the day were conversations with Mark Colville and later Steve Kelly, both of whom called us from the Detention Center. Each had begun the day reading the same reflection we had earlier shared, which included a passage from the Sermon on the Mount. Choosing to “go the extra mile,” our friends who face trial bring to life the spirit of early abolitionists and the ancient call to choose life that you and your descendants might live.

Even before details of President Donald Trump’s Israeli-Palestinian peace plan is released, Palestinian leaders and activists have already declared it “dead on arrival.”

Palestinians strenuously argue the plan will fail. They oppose Trump’s call for Arab Gulf states to invest billions into the economically devastated Gaza Strip as a strategy to further divide Palestinians.

Reinforced by America’s UN Ambassador Nikki Haley’s blindness to Israel’s atrocities against Gazan civilians, and the Trump administration’s unilateral recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, one can understand why Palestinians have no faith in the US as a fair peace arbiter.

But Palestinians can’t blame everything on the US administration, or even Israel’s hard-line government. They need to recognize their own failures. Palestinians have failed to define a strategy to achieve their vision of two states because Palestinians can’t see past their own suffering. They have no alternative to rejectionism.

The last Palestinian to formulate a solution was the late President Yasser Arafat, though he was stymied by the Palestinian public’s anger and inability to embrace the concept of compromise over the issue of the right of return. He was also stymied by Israeli fanatics who murdered his peace partner, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

In fairness to Arafat’s feeble successor, Mahmoud Abbas, there is no Israeli peace partner. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is an extremist with a brilliant mind for deceptive strategic thinking, or dissimulation.

Ask the Palestinians, what is their plan? They have none. Instead of talking about peace, Palestinians are rejecting proposals that haven’t even been proposed yet. Rejectionism is like that — a state of mind in which nothing is acceptable, and compromise is non-existent.

Maybe that’s the problem. Palestinians are justified in decrying Israel’s heinous atrocities. Shooting innocent and unarmed civilians in the head is an international war crime. But Israel’s government didn’t just start violating international law; it has been ignoring it for years. However, rather than complain about the moral parameters of the international laws that they violate on a daily basis, the Israelis have instead crafted a posture of dissimulation.

Israel seeks to expel non-Jews (Christians and Muslims) from the Holy Land. That is their long-term game plan. But Israelis don’t publicize their true goals in emotional outbursts, protests and acts of violence. They implement their goals with deceit. They have adopted 65 specific laws to undermine the human rights of Palestinians, but they conceal the intent of those laws. They are introducing more restrictions, including punishing those who film Israeli soldiers killing unarmed Palestinians. They seek to punish institutions that express sympathy for the Palestinian Nakba (or catastrophe), and are seeking to expel Arab Knesset members who challenge Israel’s racist policies.

Israel’s public call for peace is in a vacuum without sound or substance. Its cries about Palestinian violence are loud but morally bankrupt. Israeli suffering is nothing in comparison to the violence and carnage Israel commits against Palestinians.

Just look at the numbers. Using the Jewish Virtual Library, a biased anti-Arab source, data shows that nearly four times as many Arabs have been killed than Israelis since the 1920s. Palestinian and international human rights groups put the number of Arabs killed even higher. In recent years, the disparity has been even greater, with 9,600 Palestinians killed since the collapse of the peace process in 2000, compared with 1,251 Israelis.

Despite aberrations, Israel manages to disguise its dissimulation through strategic communications, public relations spin and clever rhetoric, making the lesser number of Israelis killed seem more important. Israeli deaths certainly get more media coverage than Palestinian deaths, but Israel argues the disparity in numbers killed is meaningless.

If the tables were turned, however, Israel would not do what Palestinians are doing. Instead of denouncing US’ plans, Israelis would embrace it, while mounting an effective public relations campaign to expose its flaws. They would not allow themselves to become the obstacle preventing the public from seeing the truth. They would not rely on protests, extremist rhetoric and emotional outbursts to define themselves. Neither should the Palestinians.

When Trump outlines a plan to invest billions into the Gaza Strip to bolster its devastated economy, Palestinians should welcome it. When Trump urges compromise on Jerusalem, Palestinians should convey the obvious shortcomings in a reasoned and effective PR campaign. When Trump calls for peace, Palestinians should focus on the bigger picture and define themselves as peacemakers, calling Israel’s bluff. Put Israel in the position of publicly saying no to peace.

Don’t reject Trump’s peace plan, declare it a “good start.” Show the face of reason while pushing down the face of extremism and rejection.

Don’t just speak out against Israeli violence; speak out against Palestinian violence and extremism as well. Extremist Palestinian rhetoric has been exploited by Israel as a cover, allowing it to commit and justify its own atrocities.

Palestinians must change how they are perceived and stop being predictable, doing what everyone knows they will do when presented with an unacceptable peace plan. What Palestinians must do is embrace Trump’s efforts and recast themselves as champions of peace. Palestinians should meet with Trump and his biased pro-Israel advisers, and make it harder for Israel to put all blame on the Palestinians.

This isn’t about peace any more. It is about survival. It is about redefining the Palestinian public image. That can only be achieved by rejecting rejectionism.

By Edwin Madunagu*

The political terrain in Nigeria, today has two colossal parties—PDP and APC—vying for power at the national level. However, it appears to be merely déjà vu as the binary trend has had similar appearances in Nigeria’s chequered history and experiment with democratic politics. Indeed, they have all been alignments and realignments of Nigeria’s ruling elite classes.

To appreciate, more fully, the current wave of political re-alignments in Nigeria and be able to make informed projections, we may need to go back to the Nigerian Civil War of (1967-1970) and the long preparation for the Second Republic (1979-1983).

When the military regime of General Olusegun Obasanjo finally, in August 1978, lifted the ban on political activities imposed in January 1966, two main political tendencies emerged in Nigeria’s reconstituted national ruling class. The first tendency was thoroughly conservative and aspired, and largely succeeded to be national in composition, character and formal leadership. Call it A. The second tendency was progressive both generally and within the context of Nigeria’s political history. It was more modern. It also aspired to be national in composition, but was more limited in national spread than the first tendency—for historical reasons that may be put aside for now. Call this second tendency B. Tendency A, though national, had its centre of gravity in what is now known as the North-western zone of the country while tendency B, though also national, had its centre of gravity in South-western zone.

I proceed with four propositions. One: Tendencies A and B were in real ideological opposition to each other. Two: All the other political tendencies in the national ruling class which were, at this time, in preparation for the Second Republic—were either factions of, or protest groups from, tendencies A or B or both. Tendency A transformed into the National Party of Nigeria (NPN), which produced the only president of the Second Republic, Alhaji Shehu Shagari. Tendency B transformed into the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) led by Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Three: These two main political tendencies in Nigeria’s post-Civil War national ruling class were not subjective or arbitrary creations. Rather, they were objective products of Nigeria’s political history, class formation and social formation. They have survived all the succeeding stages of our political history since the Second Republic. Their organisational forms have however changed several times. So, have the relationships between them.

The fourth proposition—which can be attached to the third proposition as an explanatory note—is that Nigeria’s ruling class is characterised by this duality: On the one hand, as a national ruling class, it is fundamentally united by capitalism (as the dominant mode of production) and capitalist rules and logic (which run the entire economy). On the other hand, the class is divided by many things: history; places and roles in the economy; primitive/primary accumulation of capital; ethnicity; regionalism, religion; culture; etc.

The fifth proposition is that at least twice during this post-Civil War period, circumstances and opportunities have arisen for tendencies A and B, through crises, splits, combinations and separations, to transcend their old political forms and produce two new ideologically distinguishable political formations each of which would be more truly national. The first opportunity, ironically, was General Babangida’s creation of the National Republican Convention (NRC) and Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1989 and the second was the emergence of All Progressives Congress in 2013. The first opportunity was lost and the second is now under severe test. A reader may remind me here that during the Second Republic (1979-1983), parties opposed to the ruling NPN announced attempts to “come together” in an alliance. All I can say, in response, is that until those attempts irredeemably collapsed not even the most elementary physical structure was set up for fighting a common foe as powerful as the NPN!

We may now elaborate. In September 1989 then military dictator, General Ibrahim Babangida, dissolved all the political parties whose autonomous formation the regime had earlier permitted. The country was then being taken through a long, convoluted transition-to-civil-rule programme. In a presidential statement the regime announced the establishment, by decree, of two national parties: a “little-to-the-right” National Republican Convention (NRC) and a “little-to-the-left” Social Democratic Party (SDP). Nigerian politicians who were free and able to do so were advised to join either of the two parties. It was an act of monumental humiliation, which politicians largely resented. Eventually, however, the military-decreed two-party system took off and the transition continued.

Two points are important here. The first is that the National Republican Convention (NRC) and Social Democratic Party (SDP)—though state-formed—became national political formations of Nigeria’s ruling class. This had happened by the middle of 1990. The second point is that by some decisions and processes large segments of the Nigerian Left embraced the SDP, but only for the purposes of the return-to-civil-rule transition programme and—in particular—for the presidential election in which Bashorun M. K. O. Abiola was the presidential candidate. However, although these segments of the Nigerian Left constituted a powerful political force in the SDP—in fact, the decisive operational force—it did not constitute a power bloc in the sense of being able to determine policy, leadership and distribution of benefits.

Until November 1993 when they were both dissolved by General Sani Abacha, both NRC and SDP remained, in character and by definition, national parties (or formations) of Nigeria’s ruling class. We do not have the space here to digress to what happened to the transition programme, to the June 1993 presidential election and to SDP’s presidential candidate, Chief Abiola. The closing point is that Nigeria’s ruling class, as a single national ruling class, lost an opportunity to produce two ideologically distinct, but national political formations for their dominance and rule.

The most recent opportunity which history has so far presented to the ruling class of Nigeria to evolve two ideologically distinguishable national political formations came in 2013 during the Jonathan presidency: the following opposition parties and formations of the ruling class came together: the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), the All Nigerian Peoples Party (ANPP) plus factions of the governing People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA). The first three parties (ACN, CPC and ANPP) actually dissolved themselves and were joined by factions of PDP and APGA (which, on breaking off from their parent parties, also dissolved themselves) to form the All Progressives Congress (APC), the current central governing party of Nigeria’s ruling class.

The All Progressives Congress (APC) was, right from the start, a nationally-based party which, mainly on account of the antecedents of the ACN and the reputation of CPC’s leadership, was seen as potentially progressive. Later, as the 2015 general elections drew closer, the newly-founded APC was joined by some activist groups and elements from the Nigerian Left—making the new party more potentially progressive in the context of Nigerian history and politics. The result was that Nigerians were presented with two main choices in the 2015 elections: The ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the newly-created All Progressives Congress (APC). The former was created in 1998 as a conservative party of Nigeria’s ruling class. It had remained so. The latter emerged, as earlier stated, as a potentially progressive party of the ruling class. Both were large and nationally-based. Thus, with the emergence of APC/PDP in 2013, Nigeria’s ruling class had a “re-birth” of NRC/SDP of 1990.

The questions now are: Will Nigeria’s ruling class—presently in political turmoil—reconstruct their political formations but still maintain two main parties, or will they return to the multiplicity of (1999–2013)? Will the two parties be ideologically distinguishable? Will any of them seriously put the main questions before the nation on its agenda? Will they both be truly national? And, finally, what will the Nigerian Left be doing as the ruling class, again, takes the popular masses of Nigeria through another long round of un-redeeming ride? In particular, how does the Left intervene in this current process of separation and combination?

*Edwin Madunagu is a mathematician and journalist, writes from Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria.

The world is riven with class conflicts in Latin America, political conflicts between the Anglo-Americans and Russians, and economic conflicts between Washington against Europe and Asia.

The conflicts have called into question the capacity of ruling elites to promote growth, to secure international stability and to foster global as co-operation.

To understand the underlying source of conflicts it is essential to identify and unmask the underlying political and economic interests which spread and deepen class, regional and global confrontations.

Latin America: Reforms Which Deform

In recent decades throughout Latin America, rulers have spoken and demanded ‘reforms’ as essential to stimulate and sustain growth and foster equity and sustainability. The ‘reforms’ involve implementing ‘structural changes’ which require large scale privatization to encourage entrepreneurship and end state corruption; deregulation of the economy to stimulate foreign and domestic investment; labor flexibility to ‘free’ labor markets and increase employment; and lower business taxes. According to the reformers all this will lead to free markets and promote democratic values.

Over the past thirty years, ruling elites in Latin America have carried out IMF and World Bank structural reforms in two cyclical periods: between 1989-1999 and more recently between 2015-2018. In both cases the reforms have led to a series of major economic, political and social deformations.

During the first cycle of ‘reforms’, privatization concentrated wealth by transferring public means of production to oligarchs, and increased private monopolies, which deepened inequalities and sharpened class divisions.

Deregulation led to financial speculation, tax evasion, capital flight and public- private corruption.
‘Reforms’ deformed the existing class structure provoking social upheavals, which precipitated the collapse of the elite led ‘reforms’ and the advent of a decade of nationalist populist governments.
The populists restored and expanded social reforms but did not change the political and economic ‘deformations’, embedded in the state.

A decade later (2015) the ‘reformers’ returned to power and restored the regressive free market policies of the previous neo-liberal ruling elite. By 2018 a new cycle of class conflicts flared throughout Brazil and Argentina, threatening to overturn the existing US center free market order.

Anglo America Russophobes as Fake Miracle workers; the Post Christ Resurrections

As part of the propaganda campaign to discredit and isolate Russia, the UK and the Ukraine, stalwart flunkies of Washington, accused Moscow of assassinations by poison and bullets. Both alleged victims appeared live and well in due time!

On March 4, 2018, the Prime Minister of the UK Theresa May claimed that Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned by Russian secret agents. Foreign Secretary Boris “Bobo” Johnson called the poison, ‘the most-deadly agent known to man’ (sic) – Novichok. According to “Terry and Bobo” the poison kills in 30 seconds. Two months later Sergei and Yulia were seen taking a stroll in a park.

The fake charges were promoted by the entire Anglo-Americans mass media. The UK proceeded to charge Putin with ‘crimes against humanity’ , backed additional diplomatic and economic sanctions, increased military spending for homeland defense and urged President Trump to take forceful action.

Once the ‘victims’ ‘rose from the dead’ the media never questioned the regime’s claim of a Russian conspiracy planned at the highest level.

The UK scored a few trivial merit points from Washington, which, however, did not prevent President Trump from slapping a double-digit tariff on British steel and aluminum exports (with more to come)!
The Ukraine joined the line of toadies trying to secure President Trump’s approval by cooking up another Russian murder plot. This time Ukraine leaders claimed Kremlin agents assassinated one Arkady Babchenko, an anti-Russian journalist and self- proclaimed exile in Kiev.

On May 29, 2018, Arkady was found ‘murdered’ or so said the Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko and repeated, embellished and circulated by the entire western mass media.

On May 31, a wide-eyed ‘Arkady’ turned up alive and claiming his ‘resurrection’ was a planned plot to catch a Russian agent!

Western regimes systematic use of lies, plots and conspiracies are central to the imperial drive for world power.

In Syria, the US accused Damascus of using poisonous gas against its own people in order to justify NATO’s terror bombing of Aleppo’s civilian population!

In Libya, Obama and Clinton claimed President Gaddafi distributed Viagra to his armed forced to rape innocent civilians, precipitating the US-EU terror bombing of the country and rape and murder of President Ghaddafi.

The question is whether western leaders will seek papal recognition of CIA directed resurrections to coincide with Easter?

Appeasement and Trump’s ‘Triumph of Will’

EU kowtowing to President Trump’s grab for global power, has only aroused his desire to dominate their markets, dictate their trade relations and defense spending. Trump tells the EU that his enemies are theirs.

Trump believes in the doctrine of unilateral trade and ‘deals’ based on the principle that the US decides what you sell, how much you pay, and what you buy. The giant French oil multinational Total, which had promised to invest in Iran ,submitted to Trump and withdrew from its agreement and turned a deaf-ear to the French President.

President Macron facing US tariffs on French exports bent his knee to Trump. Paris would support ‘joint efforts to reduce overcapacities, regulate subsidies and protect intellectual property’. Trump heard the ring of the EU begging cup and imposed tariffs and demanded more.

The EU ‘vowed’ to retaliate to Trump’s tariffs by . . . sucking up to Trump’s trade war with China. The European Commission (EC) announced it was launching a case against . . . China! Echoing Trump’s allegations that Beijing was committing the ‘crime’ of insisting (‘forcing’ in EU rhetoric) foreign investors transfer technology as part of the basis for doing business.

Trump turned on Mexico and Canada, his flunky allies in NAFTA by slapping both with tariffs.
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was ‘dismayed’ after wining and dining Trump in an embarrassing charm offensive, Trump ate, drank, and slapped a tariff on steel and aluminum and threatened to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In response Trudeau cited Canada’s century and a half military support for US imperial wars. To no avail!

For Trump, the past is the past. It’s time to move ahead and for Canada to ‘buy American’.

And when Trudeau talked of imposing reciprocal tariffs on US exports, Trump countered by threatening to break all trading agreements. At which point Trudeau proposed ‘further’ negotiations.

Trump’s tariff on Mexican steel and aluminum exports evoked the robust response of a true Treaty lackey – the Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto claimed negotiations were ‘continuing’ and US companies were ‘involved’!

The harder Trump pushed, the greater the retreat of his EU and North American ‘allies’. Facing rhetorical retaliation from the EU, Trump tweeted German Prime Minister Merkle’s nose out of shape, by threatening to slap Germany with car tariffs worth $20 billion dollars.

The German Prime Minister and the head of Volkswagen broke ranks with the EU, and forgot all talk of retaliation and EU ‘unity’. They embraced negotiations and proposed ‘bilateral trans-Atlantic agreements based on Trump’s terms!

Trump is not improvising’, nor is he ‘erratic’. He wields power; he knows that his competitors’ spinelessness is accompanied by mutual back-stabbing and he is exploiting their appeasement, by encouraging their belly crawling.

President Trump exhibits a ‘will to power’.

Appeasement in the nineteen thirties allowed Germany to defeat and occupy Europe. President Trump, in the 21st century. is defeating the EU and conquering its markets.

Conclusion

The language of politics is the politics of dominant world powers. Trump’s ‘reforms’ have deformed all past and present treaties,alliances and agreements in his drive for world domination.

While the UK and the Ukraine run errands, fabricating Russian assassinations and resurrecting victims, Trump has his eyes on the prize; the world’s biggest markets — the EU and China.

Yes, Trump may thank the Canadians for dying for US wars in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, but he tells Prime Minister Trudeau ‘ business is business Justin, now bend over and sing, ‘God Bless America’.

The same goes for Theresa May and Boris Johnson: close your eyes and enjoy watching our tariffs close steel mills now and auto plants tomorrow.

Trump knows his prostrate allies. He moralizes: ‘the more you screw them the better they like it’!
That’s the Trump doctrine. And its not only his personal views: the stock market loves it; the Silicon billionaires and the manufacturers are cashing in on protection at home and free markets overseas.

Trump will be entertained by the quartet of Trudeau, Macron, Merkel and May who will perform an original composition; “Making America Strong in a World of Wimps”.

By Titli Basu*

By Brian Balfour*

In a story that could only happen in 2018, septuagenarian Bernie Sanders took to twitter to agree with someone called Cardi B – who my teenage daughter tells me is a popular singer – about the importance of strengthening Social Security.

Sanders claimed that Social Security enables seniors to “retire with the dignity they deserve,” while Ms. B praised FDR for its creation.

Of course, Social Security needs “strengthening” because, by some estimates, it has long-term unfunded liabilities of $34 trillion, and will “officially” be insolvent by 2034.

The commonly held belief is that Social Security was created by FDR as a compassionate, “progressive” program to help older people feel more secure in their retirement.

Like so many progressive programs, however, Social Security was likely the creation of big businesses turning to big government technocrats to protect themselves against competition. That’s just one of countless insights unearthed by Murray Rothbard’s book The Progressive Era.

Social Security passed in 1935, but its genesis began in 1934 when FDR “commissioned three of his top officials to select the membership of a Committee on Economic Security (CES),” according to Rothbard.

The CES was the body that would craft Social Security legislation, but more specifically, the Technical Board of the CES would be tasked with the details of the plan.

Spearheading the Technical Board was J. Douglas Brown, head of the Industrial Relations Department at Princeton — a department created and largely funded by an organization called the Industrial Relations Councilors (IRC).

The IRC “had been set up in the early 1920s by the Rockefellers, specifically John D., Jr., in charge of ideology and philanthropy for the Rockefeller empire,” reports Rothbard.

The IRC was billed as a scholarly and activist group whose mission, Rothbard describes, was to “promote a new form of corporatist labor-management cooperation, as well as promoting pro-union and pro-welfare-state policies in industry and government.”

Part of the IRC’s activities included setting up Industrial Relations departments in Ivy League schools, including Brown’s at Princeton. Not coincidentally, the other two members of the CES’s Technical Board were IRC affiliates.

Which brings us back to J. Douglas Brown.

Brown was not only backed by a powerful Rockefeller outfit, he was also influenced by hand-picked advisors to the CES, many of which were heads of big businesses. Within this context, as Rothbard notes, Brown “was particularly adamant that no employers escape the taxes of the old-age pension scheme.”

Big businesses were upset that their smaller competitors were not providing retiree pensions, and wanted to use the federal government “to force their small-business competitors into paying for similar, costly, programs.”

At the time Social Security was being developed, about 15 percent of workers were covered by a company pension plan, with a little more than 300 – mostly large – businesses offering such plans.

In his testimony before the Senate Finance Committee in 1935, Brown declared that government compulsion of universal employer “contributions” to old-age pensions would make “uniform throughout industry a minimum cost of providing old-age security and protect(s) the more liberal employer now providing pensions from the competition of the employer who otherwise fires the old person without a pension.”

Put more simply, in Rothbard’s words, “the legislation deliberately penalizes the lower cost, ‘unprogressive’ employer and cripples him by artificially raising his costs compared by the larger employer.”

It should come as no surprise, as Rothbard wrote, “the bigger businesses almost all backed the Social Security Scheme to the hilt, while it was attacked by such associations of small businesses as the National Metal Trades Association, the Illinois Manufacturing Association, and the National Association of Manufacturers.”

Indeed, big businesses “collaborated enthusiastically” with the implementation of Social Security once passed. When confronted with establishing 26 million accounts for individuals, the Social Security Board consulted the Commerce Department’s Business Advisory Committee (BAC). Big business’ handprints were all over the Committee. BAC was dominated by W. Averell Harriman, wealthy heir to his father’s railroad fortune turned banker (and future New York Governor), head of Standard Oil Walter Teagle, and John Raskob of DuPont and General Motors.

Meanwhile, BAC member Marian Folsom of Eastman Kodak was instrumental in planning the creation of regional Social Security Board centers.

Rothbard’s work lays waste to the romanticized tale of Social Security as humanitarian program to provide grandpa’s nest egg. Instead, it’s just another case of big business leveraging government to protect themselves from smaller competitors, all at taxpayer expense.

About the author:
*Brian Balfour is Executive Vice President for the Civitas Institute, a free market advocacy organization in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Source:
This article was published by the MISES Institute.

By Stefano Magni*

The new Italian government is a very strange creature. It’s easy to define it as a “populist” government, but that is surely an oversimplification. It is formed by two very different political forces: the Lega (League) and the Five Star Movement, which were not allied during the 2018 general elections. As all pundits rightly forecasted, no coalition nor party won the majority. But no one forecasted two anomalies: the League trounced the party founded by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, Forza Italia (literally “Forward Italy”), becoming the largest political force on the center-Right for the first time since 1994. The second was the huge success of the Five Star Movement – a movement formed just six years ago – which became the kingmaker after winning more than 30 percent of the vote.

These unpredictable results provoked the quick collapse of the center-Right coalition and the formation of a new, unprecedented majority: the Five Star Movement and the League. But the coalition is not as natural as it has been portrayed outside Italy.

Who makes up the new coalition?

The League was founded in 1982 by former Communist sympathiser Umberto Bossi as the Lega Lombarda, a tiny autonomist party in the northern Italian region of Lombardy. It’s worth remembering that, in Europe during the late 1970s and early 1980s, autonomist movements were always leftist. The desire for regional autonomy, along with pacifism such as anti-NATO and anti-nuclear protests, were all part of the early anti-globalisation movement. Joining forces with the Veneto autonomist party, the Liga Veneta, and other similar movements in northern Italy, Bossi formed the Lega Nord (Northern League). Their first breakthrough came in the 1992 general elections, during a very special historical period: The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia had just collapsed, and nationalist and autonomist ideas ran rampant over Europe. But the Northern League didn’t promote full independence in those years.

Despite Bossi’s Communist origins, he formed a coalition with the TV mogul Berlusconi. Together, they won the general elections of 1994 aiming to bring greater economic freedom to Italy, which is still one of the most statist economies in Western Europe. The interests of northern regions, industries, and productive taxpayers aligned against the tax-consumers of the central government. Thus, the alliance with Berlusconi seemed natural, similar to the libertarian-conservative alliance inside the U.S. Republican Party. But a harsh clash of personalities between Bossi and Berlusconi led to the split of their center-Right coalition after just six months.

Then the party embarked on a short period promoting genuine nationalism: The Northern League, since 1996 aimed explicitly at the independence of the northern regions of Italy, calling them by the geographical neologism of “Padania” (after the name of north Italian plain).

It was in this period that the Northern League established ties with Serbian nationalists and the Russian far-Right. At the time these relationships seemed to be of secondary importance, but they are pivotal to understand recent developments. During the 1999 NATO intervention against Kosovo, the Northern League was strongly pro-Milosevic and its links with Russia tightened. After the 1999 European elections, the Northern League suffered an electoral and financial backlash and in 2001, Berlusconi approached Bossi again to form the new center-Right coalition. The Northern League remained a loyal ally from 2001 to 2011, when the last Berlusconi government fell. In that period, the League downplayed its nationalism (although, it was still named the “Northern League for the independence of Padania” until 2015), and its sympathies for Russian nationalism were put on the shelf. Everything changed again in 2011, when the center-Right government fell once more.

The League was pressed by an electoral crisis and a corruption trial. Bossi was replaced by the new young secretary Matteo Salvini. The new leader, sensing the nationalist renaissance all over Europe, completely changed the shape and the ideology of the party. The mission of the League was no longer securing the independence of the northern regions from the rest of Italy, but that of the whole of Italy from the new European Union super-State. In just three years, he transformed the former autonomist/pro-independence Northern League into a full-blown nationalist force inspired by Marine Le Pen’s National Front. Ties with the Russian far-Right again strengthened. Salvini’s speeches have the same emphasis: Immigration, terrorism, social crises, and the economic crisis are all evils originating from, or worsened by, the EU as part of the global financiers’ hidden agenda to replace European peoples. Salvini has presented this as the “genocide” of European native peoples, perpetrated as part of a grand conspiracy.

The Five Star Movement’s story is shorter. It was born in part from the large communications company Casaleggio Associates, which led the online protest against Italy’s economic and political establishment. Its founder, Gianroberto Casaleggio (who died in 2016) had his own “prophetic” vision of the future of politics that involved direct control by the people through the internet, establishing a world government, and completing an environmentalist and economic revolution.

The party’s first public face was the very popular comedian/activist Beppe Grillo. He scored well in the 2013 general election, making the movement the largest party, but not large enough to form a government. Nor could he be accepted as the junior party of the center-Left Democratic Party. Luigi Di Maio took control of the party in 2018 because, according to one of the Movement’s many internal rules, no one could lead the party for two consecutive legislatures. All candidates are chosen through online primary elections, but only a few tens of thousands of militants and sympathizers voted via the party’s web platform called “Rousseau” (after the eighteenth-century French philosopher is the main influence of the Movement’s agenda). In a time of deep economic crisis, the Five Star Movement events filled the streets all over Italy, mobilizing people through the skilled use of social media. Curiously, public support flagged for its environmentalist platform and all its planks: slowing economic growth, promoting the “sharing economy,” enacting a radical renewable energy plan, and discarding GDP measures with a “Gross National Happiness” index. But apparently its supporters were (and still are) attracted by two things: the party’s struggle against corruption and its promise of a universal basic income.

Statism triumphs over moral issues

What do the League and Five Star have in common? They share a powerful bond: their struggle against the free market and globalisation. While Salvini’s new League strongly opposes global capitalism in defence of national identity, the Five Star Movement opposes the market due to its radical environmentalist ideology.

The parties also share another common link: Vladimir Putin. Since 2016, the League is formally associated to United Russia, Putin’s own party. The Five Star Movement is not officially tied to the Kremlin but always countered EU sanctions against Russia, and has almost always supported the Kremlin since the Ukrainian crisis in 2014. Both parties oppose the Western liberal order based on the EU and NATO and strongly push for its revision, which benefits Russia.

The parties’ main divide comes over religion and individual rights. The Five Star Movement, being a hard-Left movement, absorbed all the secularism of the old Left. Gay marriage, gay adoptions, euthanasia, and loosening restrictions on abortion are all on their agenda – and are still applied locally by Five Star’s elected officials. On the other side, the League opposed all of these causes, considering them evils imposed by the EU’s “globalist agenda” to eradicate tradition. The League nominated perhaps the most Catholic minister in recent Italian history, Lorenzo Fontana, as the Minister for the Family and Disability. Fontana opposes all the newly invented sexual rights, is consistently pro-life, and favours home schooling – which is exceedingly uncommon in Italy.

Are the centrifugal forces of the “new rights” movement stronger than the parties’ common ground on economics and foreign policy?

Catholic voters’ values will determine Italy’s future

Italy’s future depends entirely on Catholic voters. If they consider the Five Star Movement unpalatable because of its views on human nature, the coalition will split. If they consider the struggle against “global capitalism” more important than the principles of life and family, then they will support the new coalition with enthusiasm.

More and more Catholics in Italy are attracted by anti-capitalist rhetoric, even considering global capitalism the root of all moral evils, including abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, and so on. This is a message constantly spread by many influential Catholic blogs in Italy, by young intellectuals like the popular philosopher Diego Fusaro, and a new generation of “communitarian” thinkers which are proliferating on the internet and beyond.

The new government could give birth to a new form of intellectual fusionism based on anti-capitalist ideology. And this is not good news for anyone concerned.

About the author:
*Stefano Magni, born in Milan in 1976, is an independent journalist and writer. Graduated in Political Science, he wrote essays on Federalism in Italy (Contro gli statosauri, per il federalismo, Libertates Libri, Milano, 2010), on Human Rights and Economic Reform in China (Quanto vale un Laogai, Libertates Libri, 2012), on Margaret Thatcher (This Lady is not for Turning, IBL, 2013) and an inquiry on the rising Tea Party movement (It’s Tea Party Time, Magna Carta, 2011). He’s also author of a novel about a counter-factual history of the First World War (Piazza Caporetto, Libertates Libri, 2015). He translated Rudolph Rummel’s classic Death by Government (Stati Assassini, Rubbettino, 2005) and Robert Nisbet’s Social Change and History (Storia e cambiamento sociale, IBL 2017) into Italian. He’s associate professor of Economic Geography at Milan University and editor of La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, an online Catholic newspaper.

Source:
This article was published by the Acton Institute.

By Dr. Matthew Crosston*

In the now famous and well-recognized #MeToo era in America, the call to eliminate sexual harassment in the workplace and beyond has brought much needed new attention to gender issues in the United States, with more than a few prominent firings and public humiliations of celebrities within media and entertainment. While there is no doubt this movement was long overdue in high-level boardrooms and executive ladders across America (and still needs to continue its corrective cleansing), it is not a misdirection to remind people that the fight for gender ‘decency’ still remains woefully under-covered and under-recognized by most of the Western world. This is not a misnomer: before we can begin to discuss gender equality, there are still too many places that do not even come close to having gender decency.

Perhaps even more disturbing, when one does a simple but powerful examination across many different human rights, philanthropic, and security organizations, is that we find a plethora of ratings in which the horrible plight of women around the world have been categorized and assessed. What has not been done up to now is an amalgamation of many of these rankings to try and give a more complex and holistic 50,000-foot view of women around the world. Unfortunately, this amalgamation paints a rather stark picture that few people seem to be aware of. Even more depressing, when the ranking categories are allowed to be truly diverse, the dark richness of countries represented is shocking: most in the West will not be surprised to find certain countries in sub-Saharan Africa or Islamic authoritarian states to make lists that lament the plight of women as concerns gender equality. But the following rankings show that this problem is by no means an African or Arab-dominated issue. It is truly a global plague that seems stubbornly resistant to remedies, let alone cures. So, let us take a view at the dark side of the gender fight, for only in recognizing the severity of the problem will true resolutions ever come to light.

One of the more famous human rights organizations in the world, this Amnesty International ranking was a good place to start simply because it emphasizes the most explicit and disturbing form of gender inequality: direct violence perpetrated against women. This list is also something of a ‘Western conventional wisdom’ baseline, in that the so-called usual suspects are on it, including Afghanistan, the DRC, Pakistan, and Somalia. Perhaps the one ‘surprise’ on the list for those not truly investigating the issue would be the inclusion of India. It is an important inclusion, however, given the sexual and family violence issues that still plague many areas of India, especially rural and semi-rural areas. It is also good for people to realize that the worst places for women are not just automatically the places torn apart by war, anarchy, or corruption.

Amnesty International (via Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Gender violence

1.Afghanistan

2.Democratic Republic of Congo

3.Pakistan

4.Somalia

5.India

A relatively new but influential player on the gender issue scene is Georgetown’s Institute for Women. Its ranking for health and safety is important because it is more inclusive of female health problems in their totality. Not surprisingly, these rankings reflect countries that have seen a total breakdown of societal welfare because of war, internal strife, corruption, and health epidemics.

Georgetown Institute for Women – Health and safety

1.Syria

2.Afghanistan

3.Yemen

4.Pakistan

5.Central African Republic

The Global Citizen political freedom rankings are interesting because of two entries that do not often make the usual discussions: Honduras and Egypt. When you examine the details of why these two countries made it, it is clear that both have for too long been excluded from serious gender discussions. It is also important, as we shall see below, to know that many countries within Latin America need a brighter light flashed upon them for their increasingly shoddy treatment of women across numerous categories.

Global Citizen – Political freedom

1.Yemen

2.Honduras

3.Democratic Republic of Congo

4.Egypt

5.Saudi Arabia

While most are familiar with Marie Claire as a women’s magazine with a long history of less-serious discussions, it did nevertheless come out recently with its own gender equity ranking for countries around the world. It was included simply because of its rather novel interpretations of how to recognize and evaluate inequality, focusing on more subtle discrimination rather than on more direct and explicit forms. With this done, a rather fascinating list emerges, with countries like Nepal, Peru, and Turkey making the list (something we rarely see for any of these countries in other rankings).

Marie Claire – Gender Equity

1.Pakistan

2.Nepal

3.Peru

4.Turkey

5.Sudan

While few know about the WEF organization, its focus on education and how it impacts gender issues and female opportunity is especially pertinent. The ability for women to grow, prosper, and lead independent financial lives is a crucial element often neglected around the world because of more pressing immediate concerns for physical safety and political equality. But when the issue of education is examined through a gender lens, we once again find a mix of the usual suspects with relative newcomers not often found on gender watchdog lists, in this case Chad and Iran.

WEF– Education

1.Yemen

2.Pakistan

3.Syria

4.Chad

5.Iran

World Atlas’ female political representation rankings were fascinating largely because of the fact that it was the one list that was largely made up entirely of countries very few people know about and rarely see connected to major gender issues. Of the six below, only Yemen is a common entrant (and honestly some might find that entry somewhat mitigated by the internal war going on there which has resulted in an almost complete shutdown of regular governmental and societal welfare institutions/services), with Qatar being joined by countries from the South Pacific: Palau, Micronesia, Tonga, and Vanuatu. Most depressing, it does not mean regions like the Middle East and Africa are doing a great job at female political representation. It just means another region of the world few know about is doing even worse.

World Atlas – Female Political Representation

1.Qatar

2.Palau

3.Micronesia

4.Tonga

5.Yemen and Vanuatu

Perhaps the most controversial ranking was left for last, the Small Arms Survey for femicide (the purposeful and blatant murder of women on account of gender). While it may not surprise everyone to finally see the Russian Federation appear on this list, given common Western media portrayals of that society as being particularly harsh and unforgiving towards women in general, it should be a shock to see so many Latin American countries dominate the list. The reality is that countries like El Salvador and Guatemala are not alone, with many other Latin American countries making the list in the 6-15 spots. But perhaps most disheartening of all, this ranking achieves the greatest global diversity, with Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa all represented by individual countries.

Small Arms Survey – Femicide

1.El Salvador

2.Jamaica

3.Guatemala

4.South Africa

5.Russian Federation

In a way, the femicide rankings are a microcosm of the gender issue overall: it is truly a global affliction that needs more recognition and more serious warriors willing to engage the fight. This affliction knows no geographical boundaries and is not exclusive to a particular culture, religion, economic status, or political system. It seems uniquely universal, in that men the world over seem united in expressing their hatred or disdain for women in devastatingly rich and comprehensive ways. Ultimately, our failure to produce these new gender warriors (and they need to be from both genders, not just women, to be sure) is not just a failure for women or for gender equality. It is a failure of us all as a society when it comes to human compassion and dignity. It is a core failure of human decency. It is the failure to be human.

About the author:
*Dr. Matthew Crosston is Executive Vice Chairman of ModernDiplomacy.eu. He is Senior Doctoral Faculty in the School of Security and Global Studies at the American Military University and was just named the future Co-Editor of the seminal International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. His work is catalogued at: https://brown.academia.edu/ProfMatthewCrosston/Analytics

Source:
This article was published by Modern Diplomacy.

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