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Boris Johnson Accuses May Of Wrapping UK With ‘Suicide Vest’ And Brussels Detonator

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Boris Johnson, Britain’s former foreign secretary, who resigned over differences on Brexit strategies with Prime Minister Theresa May in July, has caused a fresh controversy by accusing her of wrapping a “suicide vest” around Britain and handing the detonator to Brussels.

The latest remarks appeared in an article penned by Johnson The Mail on Sunday, in which he described the latest Brexit strategy by the government “a humiliation.”

“We have opened ourselves to perpetual political blackmail. We have wrapped a suicide vest around the British constitution – and handed the detonator to [EU’s negotiator] Michel Barnier,” Johnson wrote.

The first reactions from the government over the article came from two Foreign Office ministers who served under Johnson as foreign secretary.

Minister for Europe and the Americas Alan Duncan was one of the first to react to Johnson’s “suicide vest” metaphor as he tweeted the act as one of the most disgusting moments in modern British politics.”

“For Boris to say that the PM’s view is like that of a suicide bomber is too much,” Duncan said on Twitter.

“This marks one of the most disgusting moments in modern British politics. I’m sorry, but this is the political end of Boris Johnson. If it isn’t now, I will make sure it is later.”

Alistair Burt, the minister for the Middle East, also criticized Johnson for the controversial remarks on Twitter.

“I’m stunned at the nature of this attack. There is no justification for such an outrageous, inappropriate and hurtful analogy,” Burt said.

He said: “If we don’t stop this extraordinary use of language over Brexit, our country might never heal. Again, I say, enough.”

“A suicide bomber murdered many in the courtyard of my office in Helmand,” Tory MP and Foreign Relation Committee Chariman Tom Tugendhat said.

“Comparing the PM to that isn’t funny,” he said, taking on Johnson on Twitter.

Johnson attacked the latest Brexit strategy – also known as the Chequers proposal – in the article, by saying it “keeps us subject to EU rules for goods, for food, in practice for trade, and much else besides.”

“We look like a seven stone weakling being comically bent out of shape by a 500lb gorilla,” Johnson wrote.

He also rejected a “backstop” option for Northern Ireland — a measure to avoid hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland.

According to the EU’s plan, Northern Ireland is to remain part of the single market should no trade deal resolve the border issue.

“We have managed to reduce the great British Brexit to two appalling options: either we must divide the union, or the whole country must accept EU law forever,” Johnson wrote.

Johnson last month came under fire after making Islamophobic remarks targeting Muslim women wearing burqas.

Johnson has faced calls to apologize after he said, in an opinion piece published in the Daily Telegraph, that Muslim women wearing burqas look like “letter boxes” and compared them to “bank robbers.”

His comparison has since been condemned by many politicians and organizations, including the Muslim Council of Britain.

Original source


We Can No Longer Afford A Fossil Fuel Economy – OpEd

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The Global #RiseForClimate actions are just one example of many that the climate justice movement is building the power needed to transform the economy and put in place policies to confront climate change.  The ingredients exist for the climate justice movement to rapidly succeed. A challenge is not knowing how much time we have. Scientists have been conservative in their estimates, and feedback loops could rapidly increase the impacts of climate change.

The costs of not acting are high. The benefits of investing in a clean energy economy would be widespread. We need to keep building the movement.

The Climate Crisis Is Already Devastating

The urgency of the climate crisis is obvious and cannot be reasonably denied. ABC News reported about the horrific California wildfires, saying there is an “undeniable link to climate change.” They wrote, “Experts have said that rising temperatures linked to climate change are making the fires larger, more dangerous and more expensive to fight.” This year’s fires broke records set by last year’s fires, leading Governor Jerry Brown to describe them as the “new normal” caused by years of drought and rising temperatures.

Researchers at Columbia University and the University of Idaho reported in 2017 that human-caused warming was drying out forests, causing peak fire seasons across the West to expand every year by an average of nine days since 2000. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said the 2017 fire season cost more than $2 billion, making it the most expensive fire season on record.

Extreme heat is becoming more common because of climate change. Since 2001, 17 of the 18 warmest years on record have occurred. Records were broken all over the world this year. Record heat is also contributing to more ferocious stormsStorms with heavy rain and high winds are increasing, as the Union of Concerned Scientists warns.

Michael Mann, an atmospheric science professor at Penn State University, clarifies the science:

“What we can conclude with a great deal of confidence now is that climate change is making these events more extreme. And its not rocket science, you warm the atmosphere it’s going to hold more moisture, you get larger flooding events, you get more rainfall. You warm the planet, you’re going to get more frequent and intense heat waves. You warm the soils, you dry them out, you get worse drought. You bring all that together and those are all the ingredients for unprecedented wildfires.”

Economic Cost of Climate Impacts Is Rising

Global warming will hit the US economy hard, particularly in the South. The Richmond branch of the Federal Reserve Bank cites a study that finds refusing to combat climate change could utterly devastate the South’s entire economy. The Fed notes, “higher summer temperatures could reduce overall U.S. economic growth by as much as one-third over the next century, with Southern states accounting for a disproportionate share of that potential reduction.”

There is a correlation between higher temperatures and lower factory production, lower worker productivity and lower economic growth. An August 2018 report found: “The occurrence of six or more days with temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit reduces the weekly production of U.S. automobile manufacturing plants by an average of 8 percent.”

Ironically, the oil and gas industry, which is accused of undermining climate science, is now asking government to protect it from the impacts of climate change. When Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, swamping Houston, it caused an immediate 28 cents per gallon increase in the price of oil. After Harvey a Texas commission report sought $61 billion from Congress to protect Texas from future storms. Joel N. Myers, of AccuWeather, predicted in 2017 that the total losses from Harvey “would reach $190 billion or one percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.” The cost of a 60 mile seawall along the Texas coast is initially projected to be $12 billion.

Harvey broke the record set by Hurricane Katrina, which cost $160 billion.  The 10 most destructive hurricanes caused an estimated $442 billion in losses. Out of 27 extreme weather events in 2016, researchers for the American Meteorological Society have correlated 21 of them to human-caused climate change.

A 2018 Climate Change Assessment report for  California estimated climate change:

“could soon cost us $200 million a year in increased energy bills to keep homes air conditioned, $3 billion from the effects of a long drought and $18 billion to replace buildings inundated by rising seas, just to cite a few projections. Not to mention the loss of life from killer heat waves, which could add more than 11,000 heat-related deaths a year by 2050 in California, and carry an estimated $50 billion annual price tag.”

Impacts are seen throughout the United States. A report found that “since 2005, Virginia has lost $280 million in home values because of sea-level rise.” A 2018 study found coastal properties in five Southeastern states have lost $7.4 billion in potential value since 2005. The 2017 Hawaii Sea Level Rise Vulnerability and Adaptation Report estimates the lost value of flooded structures and land at over $19 billion. Additionally, Hawaii’s roadways, bridges and infrastructure will cost $15 billion to repair and replace. The National Flood Insurance Program is losing $1.4 billion annually largely due to claims in 284 coastal counties. The Congressional Budget Office  finds the program is already $20.5 billion in the red even after the government forgave $16 billion in debt last fall.

These are just some of the many costs — food, agriculture, fishing, oceans, storms, fires, droughts, heat, flooding and more are going to worsen significantly.

Climate change could be the cause of the next economic collapse due to the cost of climate damage, an insurance industry crisis, or stranded assets, as over-investing in carbon energy has caused a fragile carbon bubble.

The US Can Transform To A Climate Justice Economy Now

While there has been progress on clean energy, it is inadequate and sporadic compared to the urgent needs. We need dramatic escalation with clear goals — keep fossil fuels in the ground, use agriculture and wetlands to sequester carbon, deploy renewable energy, build climate justice infrastructure and transition to a new economy based on sustainability, democracy and equity.

This week, the world’s largest wind farm opened. It can power 590,000 homes in the UK. Another planned wind farm could provide the power for 2 million homes. The world is only scratching the surface of the potential of wind and solar.

We can no longer afford the old carbon energy economy. A new climate economy would add $26 trillion to the global economy by 2030, a conservative estimate. It will create 65 million new jobs and prevent 700,000 premature deaths. This transformation provides an opportunity to create the future we want based on economic, racial and environmental justice.

Just as we are underestimating the high costs of climate change, we have also “grossly underestimated the benefits and opportunities unlocked by smart, connected, distributed energy technologies,” David Roberts writes in Vox. We will look back after the transition and wonder why we waited as we will see “the benefit of quieter, safer, more livable cities and better respiratory health, we’ll wonder why we ever put up with anything else — why we nickel-and-dimed the transition to electric buses, long-haul trucks, and passenger vehicles; why we fought over every bike lane and rail line.” We can also implement Solutionary Rail – a network of electrified railroads that also serves as an energy grid serving rural areas and relieving roads of trucks.

The 2018 New Climate Economy Report reports time is running out; extreme damage from climate change is being locked in. We need a sustainable trajectory by 2030. The developing world needs infrastructure and much of the developed world’s infrastructure is failing. The report finds, “The world is expected to spend about US$90 trillion on infrastructure in the period up to 2030, more than the entire current stock today. Much of this investment will be programmed in the next few years.” We need to spend this on creating a new sustainable economy.

Adele Peters quotes Helen Mountford, lead author of the Global Commission project, “If we get that infrastructure right, we’re going to put ourselves on the right path. If we get it wrong, we’ll be very much stuck on that wrong pathway.”

The report examined five areas: cities, energy, food and land use, water, and industry. Building sustainable, efficient, clean energy infrastructure will reduce health costs, and increase productivity and innovation. This requires policy based on equity, cutting fossil fuel subsidies while increasing the price of carbon, and investing in sustainable infrastructure.

The good news is we have the ability and technology to make the transition. We know what works. We lack the leadership, but this leadership void can be filled by the people. When we lead, the leaders will follow.

As the crisis hits and national consensus solidifies, people will need to demand a new economy based on equity, fairness, democratized energy and serving the necessities of the people and planet. This new democratized economy could include a federal buyout of the top US-based, publicly-traded fossil fuel companies. It could include the reversal of disastrous privatization with nationalization of key industries and public ownership of energy utilities to serve the public interest, rather than private interests.

National Consensus Is Solidifying For Climate Action

Despite mis-leadership by power holders and lack of commercial media coverage, people know climate change is having major negative impacts and want to action taken to confront it. Yale reports that polls show 83% want research funded on alternative energy, 77% want CO2 regulated as a pollutant, 70% want strict limits on CO2 from coal-fired power plants, and 68% even favor a carbon tax on polluters.

Obama’s policies on climate were inadequate, and he led massive building of oil and gas infrastructure. The current administration denies climate change exists, hides research on climateis reversing Obama’s positive steps and opposes the national consensus. This is going to lead to a climate justice boomerang. More storms and the cost of climate change will cause people to rebel and demand the transformation political elites have refused.

There is an impressive mobilized movement; not just the Global #RiseForClimate, but people putting their bodies on the line and risking arrest to stop carbon infrastructure. Activists are successfully delaying the approval of pipelines, often with Indigenous leadership as their rights are crucial for climate justice. Activists are arguing their resistance against polluters is being done out of climate necessity and are sometimes succeeding.

Oil companies are being sued for hiding the truth about climate change – former scientists are exposing them – and are now being forced to disclose climate change risks to shareholders. Activists are confronting investors of carbon infrastructure and insurance companies on coal. Workers are confronting unions on the issue. Youth are suing for a livable climate future.

The movement is building power. The path needed is clear, but escalation is urgent.

Claims That Many Ukrainians ‘Will Never Attend A Moscow Patriarchate Church’– OpEd

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Many in Moscow are reacting hysterically to Constantinople’s moves to grant autocephaly to the Kyiv Patriarchate, but instead of getting angry and making all kinds of threats, Pavel Tikhomirov says, Russians should be soberly assessing the situation and recognizing what they can and cannot hope to do.

The reality is, the assistant to the editor of the Russkaya narodnaya liniya portal says, is that “a large part of the Ukrainians will never go to a Moscow Patriarchate church. This I bad and offensive to all of us who believe in the reality of the realization of the ideals of the Russian world, but this is the case” (ruskline.ru/news_rl/2018/09/08/teper_poezd_uzhe_ushyol/).

“For a political Ukrainian – and the number of such people is constantly growing – the Russian world is simply ‘neo-Sovietism’ masked by new names,” Tikhomirov says. Many Ukrainians aren’t committed to Western liberalism or market ideas, but the social state they want would be one very different from that which existed in Soviet times.

According to the commentator, “we Russian patriots feel shy about speaking on this subject. We somehow conflate the Russian world with the USSR and now we are receiving the fruits of this conflation. Everything here is completely logical.” The Moscow Patriarchate had a change to escape from this, but it didn’t take it.

“A quarter of a century ago,” Tikhomirov says, “Russian Orthodoxy could have been viewed as the bearer of the idea of pre-revolutionary Russia. This didn’t please everyone, but this was an alternative both for Ukrainian nationalists and communists. But now Russian Orthodoxy is viewed entirely differently.”

For many Ukrainians now, his contacts among the Orthodox in Ukraine say, “the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate is a purely ‘KGB’ structure.” Tikhomirov says that they should recognize that Kyiv has used church structures too, but regardless of that fact, “now the situation has changed” in Ukraine against the ROC MP.

“And so, very many of our straying ex-brothers will never come to our churches,” the commentator continues. It is impossible to heal the split – [at least] with our forces.”

In this situation, Tikhomirov says, the Universal Patriarchate has begun to create a structure “in which various Ukrainians splits will join … a kind of analogue to the Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church which will exist in parallel to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.”

(For an introduction to the complex history of Orthodox churches in Estonia in the 20th and 21st century, see the article at estonica.org/en/Eastern_orthodoxy_in_Estonia_%E2%80%94_a_brief_overview_of_religious_controversy/History_of_the_controversy/ and the sources cited therein.)

Moscow could have sent its own exarchs to Ukraine and won over many Ukrainians but certainly not the majority. But the Russian church and government weren’t willing to get only part of a loaf; they wanted it all, Tikhomirov says. And now they are left with a situation in which they will not get much at all.

In Ukraine, “the train has already left” the station; and Moscow has been left behind.

In response, Russians should consider the situation in a sober fashion. On the one hand, Russian Orthodox can only be glad that some Ukrainian faithful will go to church and gain access to the mysteries, even if it is not a Russian church and even if the Russian church has misplayed the situation.

And on the other, Tikhomirov concludes, “the time has come for our brothers from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate to draw conclusions and make a choice.” They also should approach this with sobriety rather than in an emotional and alarmist way.

Tory Kafuffles: Boris Johnson, Brexit And Suicide Vests – OpEd

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The next blow in Boris Johnson’s chapter of political suicide has been made: a piece in the Mail on Sunday which supplied him ample room to take yet another shot at the ghostly British prime minister, Theresa May. There was nothing new in it; everybody knew what Johnson’s views were, and the position he had taken since hyperventilating over July’s Chequers statement on Brexit was simply reiterated with the usual reckless prose.

May’s Brexit deal, scribbled Johnson with an almost boorish predictability, was tantamount to wrapping “a suicide vest around the British constitution” and handing “the detonator to (EU chief negotiator) Michel Barnier”. (He failed to mention that he has been as indispensable as anybody else in adding to that wrapping.)

While the EU had played the role of playground bully, the UK had been unacceptably “feeble” in response, a truly pathetic counterpart. May might have sought a “generous free trade deal” with the EU in the aftermath of the divorce; instead, Britain was effectively saying to those in Brussels, “yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir”. “We look like a seven-stone weakling being comically bent out of shape by a 500lb gorilla.”

Johnson’s very public falling out with his fellow Tories after resigning as Foreign Secretary continues to play out the ailing nature of the May government in very public fashion. Cabinet ministers have had to take very public stances to back the prime minister. Current Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt sounded trench bound in waiting for the barrage, calling on colleagues to keep firm behind May “in the face of intense pressure”.

Former army officer and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee Tom Tugendhat found himself falling for the old trick that such provocation requires stern correction. “A suicide bomber murdered many in the courtyard of my office in Helmand. The carnage was disgusting, limbs and flesh hanging from trees and bushes. Brave men who stopped him killing me and others died in horrific pain. Some need to grow up. Comparing the PM to that isn’t funny.”

Brexit, and in a sense, the broader miasmic effect of the Trump presidency on political language, has supplied a release of military metaphors, spells of doom, and imminent calamity. Decorum has come to be seen as the enemy of honesty; opponents are just stopping short of lynching each other. For Alistair Burt of the Foreign Office, the language used by Johnson was not merely “outrageous, inappropriate and hurtful”. “If we don’t stop this extraordinary use of language over Brexit, our country might never heal. Again, I say, enough.”

The issue with Johnson has certain similarities to another Westminster country thousands of miles away, and one still insisting on retaining the same British monarch as head of state. Australia resumes parliament with a new prime minister after a needless bloodbath initiated by party functionaries hypnotised by pollsters and number crunchers. The plotters there were also claiming that the governing party had gone vanilla and soft on the hard political decisions. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had been all too centrist when he could have done with a few lashings of decent, hard right ideology. The result: Australia’s first Pentecostal leader.

Johnson’s overall popularity in Britain is on par with May, a statement of true depression and deflation. But where he has traction is in the ideological, stark-raving mad stakes, a point that May’s aides know all too well, given their efforts to compile a 4,000 word “war book” on the man’s sexual proclivities in 2016. Unlike other European states, sexual prowess, evenly spread inside and out of marriage, is seen as an impediment to high office.

Johnson certainly has his own cheer squad within the Tories. Tory Brexiteer Andrew Bridgen acclaimed Johnson’s appeal and how he “speaks truth unto power”; Tory MP Nadine Dorries suggested that his detractors were merely “terrified by his popular appeal”. Were he to become leader of the Tories, and prime minister, “he’ll deliver a clean and prosperous #Brexit.”

Others are playing the middling game. Home Secretary Sajid Javid merely called for more “measured language” to be used, because that was evidently “what the public want to see.” On the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, Javid was making sure about booking a seat in any future cabinet that might have a new prime minister. “I think there are much better ways to articulate your differences.”

Johnson is a spluttering John Bull, foolhardy and all, and his supporters like that. Irresponsible, destructive, a true political malefactor and dressed up public school boy charlatan, he is genetically programmed to disrupt rather than succeed, to undermine rather than govern. His world is not that of figures and sober appraisals, the desk job assessment, the compiler of facts. Those are best left to the hard working empirical types of industry and a hard day’s work.

Even his personal life has not been immune from the all-consuming circus that is the Boris show. His announcement last week that he and his wife of 25 years, Marina Wheeler, would be divorcing, was seen as a political calculation, timed to eliminate any prospect of scandal in the event of a leadership challenge to May.

His opponents, however, have an eternal hope that he will self-destruct, stumbling into a back-end swamp where he will perish as quietly as possible. Johnson’s barbed comments, came foreign office minister Alan Duncan, marked “one of the most disgusting moments in modern British politics”. Making them spelled “the political end of Boris Johnson”. Unlikely; should Johnson conclude his political career anytime soon, he is bound to be as destructive as the vest he claims May has wrapped Britain in.

Serbia’s Djokovic Wins US Open Over Argentina’s Del Potro

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(RFE/RL) — Serbia’s Novak Djokovic won his second straight major tennis title by defeating Argentina’s Juan Martin del Potro in the U.S. Open.

With the 6-3, 7-6 (4), 6-3 victory on September 9 in Flushing Meadows, New York, the 31-year-old Djokovic claimed his 14th overall major title in his career.

That put Djokovic tied for third place with Pete Sampras for career Grand Slam titles. Roger Federer has 20 titles and Rafael Nadal has 17.

Djokovic received $3.8 million for his latest victory.

He won the Wimbledon Grand Slam event earlier this year in Britain.

It was Djokovic’s eighth U.S. Open final, with titles won in 2011 and 2015.

Djokovic has worked his way back after missing the end of last season with a right elbow injury.

A day earlier, Japan’s Naomi Osaka beat U.S. star Serena Williams, her childhood hero, 6-2, 6-4 to win the women’s title. Osaka also won $3.8 million for the title.

Williams was penalized a point and then a game for violations related to coaching, racquet abuse, and for verbal abuse for arguing with the court umpire.

She was later fined $17,000, although she claimed she did nothing more than what men players have done many times.

US Continues Iran Bashing As Trump Prepares To Chair Security Council – Analysis

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By J Nastranis

U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley has announced that President Donald Trump will chair a Security Council meeting on Iran later this month to spotlight its “violations of international law” during the high-level week of the UN General Assembly.

Haley who holds the Council’s rotating monthly presidency said, Trump will kick off a high-level event on the global call to action on the world drug problem on September 24, and preside over a meeting relating to Iran on September 26. Trump would chair the meeting “to address Iran’s violations of international law and the general instability Iran sows throughout the entire Middle East region,” she added.

Reports quoted diplomats signifying, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani – who is expected to address the General Assembly on September 25 – might request to speak at the September 26 Security Council meeting. Haley was reported saying she would not object to Rouhani speaking.

In response, Russia’s Deputy Ambassador to the UN, Dmitry Polyanskiy, said the September 26 meeting should focus on the implementation of the nuclear deal – formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – and hoped that there would be “views voiced in connection with the U.S. withdrawal.”

Meanwhile, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has said in a meeting with President Hassan Rouhani and members of his cabinet that he does not see any hope of Europe salvaging the nuclear deal that Iran reached with six countries and the European Union in 2015.

As Kelsey Davenport, director for non-proliferation policy at the Washington-based Arms Control Association points out, Khamenei and other Iranian officials contend that the remaining P4+1 parties to the nuclear deal (China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom) are not doing enough to counteract sanctions re-imposed by the U.S.

With sanctions targeting Iran’s oil sector set to enter into effect November 5, Iran is looking for the EU to create mechanisms that will allow oil exports to continue. Davenport refers to Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s statement on September 4 that Iran will give Europe until November 5 to come up with “practical mechanisms” to circumvent U.S. oil sanctions.

European countries are considering options, such as using their central banks, to facilitate the necessary transactions. “Europe may be betting that the United States would not take the extreme step of penalizing the central banks of its allies, but it is unclear if this approach is viable and will proceed,” writes Davenport.

However, Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has said: “As Europeans, we have made it clear to the Americans that we consider the withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran to be a mistake.” Meanwhile, the first U.S. sanctions have come back into force.”

“In this situation,” adds Maas, “it is of strategic importance that we make it clear to Washington that we want to work together. But also: That we will not allow you to go over our heads, and at our expense. That is why it was right to protect European companies legally from sanctions.

“It is therefore essential that we strengthen European autonomy by establishing payment channels independent of the U.S., a European monetary fund and an independent SWIFT [payments] system. The devil is in thousands of details. But every day that the Iran agreement lasts, is better than the potentially explosive crisis that threatens the Middle East otherwise.”

Maas explains in his OpEd in the German newspaper Handelsblatt that the policy towards Iran is part of plans for “a new world order”. This lend great significance to his remarks – particularly also because Germany, the economic powerhouse of Europe, has been elected as a non-permanent member of the Security Council for two years beginning January 2019.

Maas favours “a balanced partnership” with the U.S. This, he says, means that Europeans bring more weight to bear when the U.S. withdraws. “We are concerned about Washington’s withdrawal of affection, in financial and other terms, from the UN – and not only because we will soon be on the Security Council.

“Of course we can’ t fill all the gaps. But together with others, we can cushion the most damaging consequences of the thinking that says success is measured in dollars saved. That is why we have increased funding for relief organizations working with Palestinian refugees and sought support from Arab states.”

Germany’s Foreign Minister is striving for a “multilateral alliance, a network of partners who, like us, are committed to sticking to the rules and to fair competition.” This network is in his view “an association of states convinced of the benefits of multilateralism, who believe in international cooperation and the rule of the law,” and “an alliance that supports and enhances a global, multilateral order… from climate change to fair trade.”

This is a part of the reason that despite Iran’s frustrations with the sanctions situation, Tehran is continuing to abide by the nuclear deal. EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini confirmed August 31 that the latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report demonstrates that Iran is complying with the terms of the agreement.

Tehran has however not been sitting back and reeling under Washington’s verbal assaults. Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif accused Trump of planning to “abuse” the presidency of the UN Security Council to criticize Tehran. The U.S. leader “plans to abuse its SC presidency to divert a session – item devoted to Palestine for 70 years – to blame Iran for horrors U.S. clients have unleashed across ME [Middle East].”

Zarif said there is only one UN Security Council resolution on Iran, and Trump is “violating it and bullying others to do the same.” Zarif is likely referring to Resolution 2231 (2015), which endorsed the JCPOA, notes Davenport.

She avers however that Resolution 2231 “calls upon” Tehran to refrain from undertaking “any activity” related to ballistic missiles designed to be nuclear-capable. “Resolution 2231 does prohibit transfers of ballistic missiles and related technology without Security Council approval and there is evidence that Tehran is violating this provision,” notes Davenport.

She expressed this view in an Arms Control Association blog on September 7 commenting Iran’s Defence Ministry plans announced on September 1 to boost production of ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. Specifically, Amir Mohammad Ahadi, a senior adviser at the Iranian Defence Ministry, said Iran will be enhancing the power of “different types of ballistic and cruise missiles.”

He said Iran has developed the necessary infrastructure to pursue these developments. Iran’s recently unveiled new short-range Fateh ballistic missile with “pinpoint accuracy” appears to confirm the plans to enhance the country’s missile capabilities.

Davenport states that in addition to the destabilizing implications of the spread of ballistic missiles, transferring the systems outside of Iran without Security Council permission is a clear violation of Resolution 2231. Tehran has reportedly placed short-range missiles at the disposal of Shia groups in Iraq, inciting the UN Secretary-General to start investigating evidence that Tehran has violated Resolution 2231 by exporting ballistic missiles, including systems used by the Houthis.

The Trump administration maintains that its approach to Iran is designed to counter Iran’s regional activities and missiles – areas not covered by the JCPOA – as well as fixing what it sees as the “flaws” in the nuclear deal.

But the decision to pull the U.S. out of the nuclear deal only makes negotiations on Iran’s ballistic missiles more challenging, notes Davenport. Not only has the United States lost the credibility to conduct such a negotiation, but the P4+1 are now having to spend time trying to save the deal, rather than focus on areas of shared concern.

She adds: The E3 (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) in particular had been open to working with the United States on a fortified approach to address Iran’s ballistic missiles outside of the nuclear deal. “But Trump’s short-sighted approach effectively ended that cooperation. Now, Iranian officials consistently maintain that they are not interested in negotiation on ballistic missiles.”

Pakistan’s Defense Day: Why Nuclear Weapon Capability Was Inevitable? – OpEd

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September 6 is known as Defense Day (Youm-e-Difa) in Pakistan. It is celebrated every year with full devotion to give tribute to the martyrs who sacrificed their lives for the defense of Pakistan during second war between India and Pakistan in 1965. Though on 6 September 1965, Pakistan’s forces played a vital role in nation’s defense but at the same time, the war has fundamentally changed the strategic thinking and security landscape of region. To understand the emerging strategic landscape of South Asia, it is necessary to study bilateral relations of India and Pakistan.

Relations between these two major powers of South Asia have remained hostile since independence. Historical disputes, contested boundaries, and disturbed balance of power forced India and Pakistan to search for counterweights through improved relations with other major powers of the world. Consequently, India’s more offensive policies and its objective to acquire “status of hegemonic power” in South Asia has consistently undermined Pakistan’s efforts to maintain “Balance of Power” and “peace” in the region. The enduring rivalry between India and Pakistan has developed a “classic insecurity trap” in the military preparations of both states. India’s initiation of nuclear weapon program in 1960 and its expanding capabilities as potential proliferator added nuclear dimension to Pakistan’s security calculations in early 1960. The turning point came in the mid-1960s after India acquired a research reactor (1960) and built a reprocessing plant in 1964.Same year, in response to China’s nuclear test, an intensive debate initiated in Indian Parliament and public circle for “nuclear bomb”.

Paradoxically, the 1965 war triggered the new demand in India for Nuclear bomb. Homi Babha’s statement was carefully noted by officials in Pakistan in which he claimed that “India could build a nuclear weapon within twelve and eighteen months”. India’s quest of nuclear capability and war of 1965played vital role in making Pakistan realize that the state has to diversify its security measures and relying only on conventional capability is not sufficient to maintain state’s security. Therefore, Pakistan’s security concerns acquired nuclear dimension. The war of 1971 appears to have additional stimulus for Pakistan’s decision makers to favor the pursuit of a nuclear weapon capability option for Pakistan. In the wake of 1971 war, Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto gave a decisive flip to country’s nuclear program. In 1972, PM Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto stated that, “We(Pakistan) will eat grass, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own (Atom bomb)…. We have no other choice”. Furthermore, Pakistan’s need for nuclear weapon capability was impelled by multiple factors including wars of 1965 and1971 between India and Pakistan; inadequate conventional capabilities to counter India’s threats and India’s first nuclear weapon test in 1974. Hence, Pakistan detonated its nuclear weapon on 28 May 1998 in response to India’s second series of nuclear weapon test on 11 and 13 May, 1998.

These factors show that Pakistan did not initiate the nuclearization of South Asia; actually India’s adversarial nature, offensive mindset of its policymakers and its inability to accept the existence of Pakistan as independent state continue to be the major hurdles in the way of establishing peaceful cooperative relations on the basis of equality. Pakistan’s nuclear weapon capability has played central role in countering any kind of external aggression through operational preparedness of the strategic forces. Though nuclear weapon capability has prevented the war between India and Pakistan by maintaining deterrence equilibrium but on this defense day it is inevitable to understand that ‘Defense’ is not limited to direct military clashes or borders security. Now defense of the state has much more meaning, obligations and complexities. Therefore, Pakistan should formulate a pragmatic policy that can counter ‘cruel and protracted tactics’ employed by the country’s adversaries to undermine its security from within. One effective tool could be the art of fourth or fifth generation warfare, more commonly known as 5GW which is more decentralized, fluid and is strategically calculated to engage the enemy on all fronts. As Sun Tzu stated, “supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting”.

*Asma Khalid is currently working as Research Associate at Strategic Vision Institute and can be reached asmaakhalid_90[at]hotmail.com

Lifestyle Changes Reduce Need For Blood Pressure Medications

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Men and women with high blood pressure reduced the need for antihypertensive medications within 16 weeks after making lifestyle changes, according to a study presented at the American Heart Association’s Joint Hypertension 2018 Scientific Sessions, an annual conference focused on recent advances in hypertension research.

Lifestyle changes are the first step in reducing blood pressure according to the 2017 American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Hypertension Guideline.

“Lifestyle modifications, including healthier eating and regular exercise, can greatly decrease the number of patients who need blood pressure-lowering medicine. That’s particularly the case in folks who have blood pressures in the range of 130 to 160 mmHg systolic and between 80 and 99 mmHg diastolic,” said study author Alan Hinderliter, M.D., associate professor of medicine at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

The researchers studied 129 overweight or obese men and women between ages 40 and 80 years who had high blood pressure. Patients’ blood pressures were between 130-160/80-99 mmHg but they were not taking medications to lower blood pressure at the time of the study. More than half were candidates for antihypertensive medication at the study’s start, according to recent guidelines.

Researchers randomly assigned each patient to one of three 16-week interventions. Participants in one group changed the content of their diets and took part in a weight management program that included behavioral counseling and three-times weekly supervised exercise. They changed their eating habits to that of the DASH plan, a nutritional approach proven to lower blood pressure. DASH emphasizes fruits, vegetables and low-fat dairy and minimizes consumption of red meat, salt and sweets. Participants in the second group changed diet only, focusing on the DASH diet with the help of a nutritionist. The third group didn’t change their exercise or eating habits.

The researchers found:

  • Those eating the DASH diet and participating in the weight management group lost an average 19 pounds and had reduced blood pressure by an average 16 mmHg systolic and 10 mmHg diastolic at the close of the 16 weeks.
  • Those following only the DASH eating plan had blood pressures decrease an average 11 systolic/8 diastolic mmHg.
  • Adults who didn’t change their eating or exercise habits experienced a minimal blood pressure decline of an average 3 systolic/4 diastolic mmHg.
  • By the study’s end, only 15 percent of those who had changed both their diet and their exercise habits needed antihypertensive medications, as recommended by the 2017 AHA/ACC guideline, compared to 23 percent in the group that only changed their diet. However, there was no change in the need for medications among those who didn’t change their diet or exercise habits – nearly 50 percent continued to meet criteria for drug treatment.

Hinderliter suspects lifestyle modifications would be just as helpful to people with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and in patients on medications for high blood pressure but that needs confirmation in future studies, he said.


Armenia: Charges Brought Against Former Prime Minister Abrahamyan

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Charges have been brought against former Armenian Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan, the former official said himself in a Facebook post.

Abrahamyan revealed that ha has signed an undertaking not to leave place of residence.

He noted that about a month ago a number of masked persons “allegedly on the basis of obtaining operational data, broke into apartments and structures belonging to me and my relatives.”

“In an interview on September 4, I criticized such behavior by the Armenian authorities. As a result, one day after the interview I was summoned to the Special Investigation Service as a witness,” the former PM said.

“After being questioned as part of a fake criminal case, they brought unfounded charges against me and had me sign an undertaking not to leave my place of residence.”

Education Is Not A Right – OpEd

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By José Niño*

Among issues in American politics, public education remains a sacred cow for many voters.

Political elites incessantly remind us that public education is a fundamental pillar of civilization. Without public education, we would continue to be uneducated savages.

All the innovations we see before us like the Internet would not be possible if it weren’t for the state-provided education pipeline.

Or so we are told.

Misunderstanding Rights

Academics and politicians assert that education is a “right,” thus compelling the state to step in and maintain a monopoly on the service.

Education, despite what conventional wisdom says, is an economic good, not a right. By definition, economic goods are scarce and satisfy the necessities and desires of consumers. Unfortunately, myopic elected officials often ignore this inconvenient truth.

This misconception emerges from a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes a right, specifically the overemphasis of positive rights over negative rights. Professor Aeon Skoble does an excellent job in breaking down the differences between positive and negative rights:

“Fundamentally, positive rights require others to provide you with either a good or service. A negative right, on the other hand, only requires others to abstain from interfering with your actions. If we are free and equal by nature, and if we believe in negative rights, any positive rights would have to be grounded in consensual arrangements.”

In sum, negative rights like life, liberty, and property prohibit others, especially government entities, from interfering with their persons or property.

Positive rights hold individual rights in contempt. Interventionists and politicians use abstractions such as “society” to justify the forceful confiscation of resources from one group of people to another group of people without any form of compensation or consent.

Since the emergence of the Bismarckian welfare state, positive rights have formed the pillar of public policymaking in the West and countless other countries. From education down to pensions, there exists a religious devotion to the idea the state must mandate individuals to either participate in a certain activity or be forced to give up their income to provide another individual with said good or service.

Free Education is Not so Free After All

Nearly two centuries of government involvement in education has conditioned citizens to believe that not only is education an entitlement, but it is somehow free. This outlook is myopic at best.

A substantial segment of the population doesn’t even use public education. Those who opt out of public education like homeschoolers and private schoolers are still forced to subsidize others who attend public schools. As Frederic Bastiat observed, the “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”

Bastiat’s astute observation, unfortunately, flies over the heads of the masses, who have been duped by politicians and the intelligentsia into believing these services are “free” and must be provided by the collective whole of society.

The real tragedy in this equation is the misallocation of resources that would otherwise have been used for more productive activities. People see the public schools, but they don’t look beyond stage one. They overlook the productive endeavors that could have been created had that money not been redistributed in the first place.

It’s no stretch to say that under a system where people can keep their money they still have the ability to build their own educational arrangements on the free market.

Therein lies the beauty of an economy free from government coercion. Entrepreneurial ventures would emerge spontaneously and tailor their services according to consumer preferences, not by bureaucratic design or the whims of political elites.

Education is another Market Service

There is nothing magical about education; it functions like any other good or service. For most professions there is an inherent demand for educated workers. So, it stands to reason that people will work in their own self-interest to educate themselves or build educational institutions to give others the necessary tools for joining the work force.

In fact, there already exist parallel educational institutions such as Coursera, Khan Academy, and Lynda where people can acquire high demand skills at reasonable prices.

Not to mention alternative forms of schooling like Montessori education also give us a sneak preview to what education would look like on the free market.

The Never-Ending Cycle of Bureaucracy

But when we start declaring everything a right, thus requiring government involvement, a new set of problems emerge.

When the state appropriates a sector of the economy, it not only monopolizes it, the state destroys any semblance of economic calculation. Destroying the ability of property owners to compares costs and gains, or discern profits and losses, ensures incoherent economic decision-making and a sub-optimal experience for consumers of said products or services.

This observation has gone from the theoretical to the practical.

In the United States, the Department of Education’s budget started out at $14.5 billion in 1979 and currently stands close to $70 billion. When other spending initiatives like the school breakfast and lunch and Head Start programs are included, the total comes out to nearly $100 billion .

Completely disregarding indicators of American government schools underperforming against international competitors, the federal government continues its futile quest intervening in education.

In the land of government services, incompetence is rewarded with bigger budgets and larger bureaucratic privileges. On the other hand, free enterprise responds to consumers, who have the power to put organizations out of business if their services are not up to par.

The concept of education having to enjoy a government monopoly exemplifies the arrogance of political actors who think that free people are incapable of bringing educational services to the free market.

We have the potential of living in a Jetson’s world of education, but the political class insists on using Flintstones practices like state coercion to provide education.

About the author:
*Jose Nino
is a Venezuelan-American political activist based in Fort Collins, Colorado. Contact: twitter or email him here.

Source:

This article was published by the MISES Institute

No End In Sight For The Afghan Conflict – Analysis

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As the Afghan government struggles to govern effectively — the country gets ready to hold parliamentary elections on 20 October.

By Harsh V. Pant

The leader of the Islamic State Khorasan in Afghanistan, Abu Saad Erhabi, along with 10 of his fighters, was killed in an air strike a few days back in a joint air and ground operation conducted by Afghan forces and US-led coalition forces. His predecessor, Abu Sayed, too was killed in a US strike on the group’s headquarters in Kunar province in July last year. A growing number of attacks in recent years in Afghanistan — including a suicide bombing at a Kabul education centre that killed dozens of people — could be traced to this violent group.

Notwithstanding this seeming success, the security situation in Afghanistan has been deteriorating rapidly, a fact underlined by a spate of recent deadly attacks — including a rocket attack on the presidential palace in Kabul — by the Taliban and Islamic State militants. This growing violence happens to come at a time when the war-ravaged nation is getting ready to hold parliamentary elections on 20 October and the Afghan government is struggling to govern effectively.

The government of President Ashraf Ghani is riven with internal rivalries. Following the resignation of Ghani’s national security adviser and close ally, Hanif Atmar, last week, interior minister Wais Ahmad Barmak, defence minister Tariq Shah Bahrami, and intelligence chief Masoom Stanekzai too put in their papers. Ghani has refused to accept their resignations, asking them to continue to stay in their posts, even as Atmar, one of the country’s most powerful politicians, has been replaced by former ambassador to the US Hamdullah Mohib. These resignations came about as the differences within the Ghani government on major national issues were out in the open. Factional and ethnic rivalries have taken a toll on Afghanistan’s security and governance.

The inability of the US to push the situation in Afghanistan on a positive trajectory has allowed other powers to enter the fray. Russia is now actively seeking to shape the strategic environment in Afghanistan. After being in touch with the Taliban for years now, primarily to get a handle on the Islamic State’s terror activities emanating from Afghanistan, Moscow is now interested in getting deeper into shaping the ground realities in the war-weary nation. Though earlier iterations of such talks did not yield anything substantive, Russia once again invited 12 countries for the Afghan peace conference, on 4 September, in which the Taliban was also expected to participate.

What is of equal, if not greater, significance is that two key states decided not be part of these talks: Afghanistan itself whose future will be talked about and the US. The Afghan government made it clear that “a peace process can only be initiated and brought forward by the Afghan government” and that it “will not participate in any further meetings that are not led by the Afghan government.”

It was because of this opposition from Kabul that Russia decided to postpone the peace conference to ensure the participation of the Afghan government. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov suggested that Russia wants “Afghan-owned peace talks and is ready for any effective cooperation in that regard with the government of Afghanistan.”

The Afghan government made it clear that “a peace process can only be initiated and brought forward by the Afghan government” and that it “will not participate in any further meetings that are not led by the Afghan government.”

Washington and Kabul have been accusing Moscow of providing support to the Taliban as a counterweight to the Islamic State, and they view Russia’s peace talks initiatives as being aimed at further enhancing ties with the Taliban, as opposed to a means of convincing the insurgents to settle theconflict. Afghanistan’s ambassador to Russia, Abdul Qayyum Kochai, underlined that “Russia wants to use the Taliban against (Islamic State).”

Afraid of losing the initiative, a senior US State Department official for the Afghan region, Alice Wells, reportedly met Taliban representatives in Doha in July end. It was a signal that perhaps the Donald Trump administration was rethinking its Afghanistan strategy. It was viewed as a major victory for the Taliban which had long insisted that it would only talk to the US directly and not to the Afghan government which it viewed as illegitimate.

The Taliban, meanwhile, is busy marking its diplomatic presence globally and has travelled to Uzbekistan and Indonesia to meet their foreign ministers with plans to travel to China and Pakistan as well. The idea is to gain global legitimacy gradually and further delegitimise the Afghan government.

On the battlefield, the Taliban continues to mark its presence, as was underscored by the siege of Ghazni earlier this month which left the city in ruins and more than 320 dead. The Taliban is hoping that battlefield momentum will allow it to gain leverage at the negotiating table.

The reality of Afghanistan today is that while the Taliban is winning the perception battle, Afghanistan’s domestic polity is in disarray. The Trump administration is losing faith in its own Afghanistan strategy articulated with much fanfare last year, and, in any case, is too preoccupied with internal matters to think coherently about the war-ravaged nation. As a result, regional power conflicts will shape the future of Afghanistan.

After initially ignoring India from its peace conference, Russia had invited India to participate in the recently cancelled Afghanistan conference. New Delhi remains cognizant of the changing ground realities and is hoping its own interests do not get sidelined in a nation in which it has made significant diplomatic and economic investments. But hope is not a policy and India needs more active engagement with all stakeholders in Afghanistan.

This article originally appeared in The Mint.

Ron Paul: Why Are We Siding With Al-Qaeda? – OpEd

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Last week, I urged the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor to stop protecting al-Qaeda in Syria by demanding that the Syrian government leave Idlib under al-Qaeda control. While it may seem hard to believe that the US government is helping al-Qaeda in Syria, it’s not as strange as it may seem: our interventionist foreign policy increasingly requires Washington to partner up with “bad guys” in pursuit of its dangerous and aggressive foreign policy goals.

Does the Trump Administration actually support al-Qaeda and ISIS? Of course not. But the “experts” who run Trump’s foreign policy have determined that a de facto alliance with these two extremist groups is for the time being necessary to facilitate the more long-term goals in the Middle East. And what are those goals? Regime change for Iran.

Let’s have a look at the areas where the US is turning a blind eye to al-Qaeda and ISIS.

First, Idlib. As I mentioned last week, President Trump’s own Special Envoy to fight ISIS said just last year that “Idlib Province is the largest Al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.” So why do so many US officials – including President Trump himself – keep warning the Syrian government not to re-take its own territory from al-Qaeda control? Wouldn’t they be doing us a favor by ridding the area of al-Qaeda? Well, if Idlib is re-taken by Assad, it all but ends the neocon (and Saudi and Israeli) dream of “regime change” for Syria and a black eye to Syria’s ally, Iran.

Second, one of the last groups of ISIS fighters in Syria are around the Al-Tanf US military base which has operated illegally in northeastern Syria for the past two years. Last week, according to press reports, the Russians warned the US military in the region that it was about to launch an assault on ISIS fighters around the US base. The US responded by sending in 100 more US Marines and conducting a live-fire exercise as a warning. President Trump recently reversed himself (again) and announced that the US would remain at Al-Tanf “indefinitely.” Why? It is considered a strategic point from which to attack Iran. The US means to stay there even if it means turning a blind eye to ISIS in the neighborhood.

Finally, in Yemen, the US/Saudi coalition fighting the Houthis has been found by AP and other mainstream media outlets to be directly benefiting al-Qaeda. Why help al-Qaeda in Yemen? Because the real US goal is regime change in Iran, and Yemen is considered one of the fronts in the battle against Iranian influence in the Middle East. So we are aiding al-Qaeda, which did attack us, because we want to “regime change” Iran, which hasn’t attacked us. How does that make sense?

We all remember the old saying, attributed to Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack, that “if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.” The “experts” would like us to think they are pursuing a brilliant foreign policy that will provide a great victory for America at the end of the day. But as usual, the “experts” have got it wrong. It’s really not that complicated: when “winning” means you’re allied with al-Qaeda and ISIS, you’re doing something wrong. Let’s start doing foreign policy right: let’s leave the rest of the world alone!

This article was published by RonPaul Institute

Russian Ruble Hits 70 To US Dollar, Weakest Since March 2016

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(RFE/RL) — The Russian ruble briefly weakened to worse than 70 to the U.S. dollar for the first time since March 2016, bringing its losses this year to 19 percent.

Amid concerns about the economy and uncertainty about U.S. sanctions, the Russian currency hit 70.16 when trading opened on September 10.

It later strengthened, dipping below 70 again.

Factors putting pressure on the ruble include U.S. sanctions and the possibility of more punitive measures as well as a sell-off of other emerging-market countries.

Reuters reported that ruble’s fall is likely to be limited by Russian export-focused companies that often sell foreign currency when it is strong, buying rubles they need for domestic obligations such as tax payments that are due in the second half of the month.

The United States and European Union have imposed a series of sanctions on Russia since 2014 in response to actions including the seizure of Crimea and support for armed separatists in eastern Ukraine.

On August 8, the U.S. State Department announced new sanctions aimed at punishing Moscow for the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in March with a rare nerve agent known as Novichok.

The initial tranche of those sanctions took effect in late August. A second tranche would kick in if Russia misses a November deadline to fulfill conditions such as providing “reliable assurances” that it will no longer use chemical weapons.

Latin America: Rightwing Interlude And The Death Rattle Of Neoliberalism – OpEd

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Business writers, neo-liberal economists and politicians in North America and the EU heralded Latin America’s embrace of a ‘new wave of free markets and free elections’. Beginning in 2015 they predicted a new era of growth, stability and good government free of corruption and run by technocratic policy-makers.

By early 2018 the entire neo-liberal edifice was crumbling, the promises and predictions of a neoliberal success story were forgotten. The ‘naysayers’ were in ascendancy.

This paper will discuss the recent rise of a so-called ‘neo-liberal wave’ or right turn and the regimes directing it.

We will critically re-evaluate the initial claims – and their fragile foundation.

We will outline the promise and program which were promoted by the neo-liberal elite.

We will then evaluate the results which ensured and the ultimate debacle.

We will conclude by examining why neo-liberalism has always been a crisis ridden project, a regime whose fundamentals are structurally unstable and based on capitalisms easy entry and fast departures.

The Neo-liberal ‘Wave’

By the beginning of 2015 and extending to 2018 a series of rightwing neo-liberal regimes came to power in some of the most important countries of Latin America. These included Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Colombia. They joined a cluster of existing ‘free market’ regimes in Mexico, Peru, Honduras and Paraguay.

Wall Street, the financial press and the White House hailed the regime changes as a ‘rightwing wave’, a return to ‘normalcy’ and a rejection of ‘populism’, corruption and economic mismanagement.

Leading investment houses looked forward to technocratic economists’ intent on following the precepts of neo-liberalism.

Bankers and investors looked forward to long-term stability, dynamic growth and lucrative opportunities.

The Neo-liberal Program

The formulae uniformly applied by the neo-liberal regimes included de-regulation of the economy – lowering tariffs, elimination of subsidies on energy, fuels and public utilities; the firing of thousands of public employees and the privatization of entire sectors of the mining, energy telecoms and infrastructure sectors.

Debt moratoriums ended and bankers were rewarded with lucrative billion dollar payments for loans they had purchased, pennies on a dollar.

The neo-liberal rulers promised that foreign investors would flock through the ‘open doors’ with long-term large-scale investments. Lucrative capital gains , benefiting from tax exemptions, would encourage the return of overseas holdings of domestic speculators.

Neo-liberal regimes claimed privatized firms could end corruption, increase employment and mass consumption. They argued that deficits and unemployment, would decline and the ‘neo-liberal wave’ would last a generation or two.

Neo-liberalism: Wave or Wash-out?

Within a year of coming to power, the neo-liberal regimes entered a terminal crisis.

In the first place most regimes came to power through authoritarian paths. In Brazil, Michel Temer took-over the presidency via a congressional coup, based on President Dilma Rousseff’s supposed administrative mismanagement. In Honduras a US backed military coup ousted the progressive liberal government of President Jose Manuel Zelaya, as was the case in Paraguay with President Fernando Lugo. In Argentina, Mauricio Macri exploited the provincial patronage machine, capitalized by a banker-media-agro-mineral alliance, to take power based on a Mexican-style ‘electoral’ process.

In Ecuador newly elected President Lenin Moreno followed a “Trojan Horse” ploy – pretended to follow in the footsteps of national populist President Rafael Correa, but once elected, embraced the Guayaquil oligarchs- Wall Street bankers.

Neo-liberalism’s democratic credentials are of dubious legitimacy.

The socio-economic policies quickly undermined optimistic promises and led to social-economic disasters. The neo-liberal regime in Argentina multiplied unemployment and under-employment twice over while living standards declined precipitously. Tens of thousands of public employees were fired. Interest rates rose to world highs at 65% – effectively eliminating business loans and financing.

Initially business enterprises which were eager to back the neo-liberal regime; but faced with devaluation, debt and depression, investors fled to safer havens after pocketing windfall profits.

In Brazil trucker strikes paralyzed activity and forced the Temer regime to retract its petrol prices.
Popular discord has blocked Temer’s regressive privatization and pension program.

Michel Temer’s popularity fell to single digits. The orthodox economic presidential replacements to Temer lag the Workers’ Party popular leader Lula Da Silva by 30% .The highly neoliberalized judiciary , faced with repudiation, has framed and barred and jailed Lula

In Colombia regime corruption led to a popular referendum, opposed by the far right. Social movements charge the new neo-liberal President Ivan Duque of ignoring and encouraging the assassination of over three hundred social activists over the past three years.

In Honduras and Paraguay, economic stagnation and social regression has driven tens of thousands to flee abroad or engage in militant movements occupying fallow fields.

In Ecuador the fake reform regime’s embrace of the business elite and IMF style ‘adjustments’ has led to wide spread disillusionment. President Moreno’s austerity program has reduced GDP to 1% and has dismantled public programs, as he lays the groundwork for privatizing mines, telecoms and banks.

As the neo-liberal regimes face the abyss, they increasingly rely on a militarized state. In Brazil the military has taken over the favelas; in Argentina military operations have proliferated—- while formerly productive capital has fled, replaced by speculative swindlers.

Conclusion

Neo-liberal regimes take power with Wall Street cheers and collapse with barely a whimper.

While financial journalists and private investment consultants express surprise and attribute the ensuring crises to regime ‘mistakes’ and ‘mismanagement’, the real reasons for the predictable failure of neo-liberal regimes is a result of fundamental flaws.

De-regulation undermines local industries which cannot compete with Asian, US and EU manufacturers. Increases in the costs of utilities bankrupt small and medium producers. Privatization deprives the state of revenues for public financing. Austerity programs lower deficits, undermining domestic consumption and eliminate fiscal financing.

Capital flight and rising interest rates increases the cost of borrowing and devalues the currency.
Devaluations and capital flight deepen the recession and increase inflation. Finance ministers raid reserves to avoid a financial crash.

Austerity, stagnation, unemployment and social regression provokes labor interest and public-sector strikes. Consumer discontent, bankruptcies lead to deep decline of regime popularity.

As the crises unfolds, the regime reshuffles ministers, increases repression and seeks salvation with IMF financing.

Financiers balk sending good money after bad. The neo-liberal regimes enter in a terminal crisis.
While current neo-liberal regimes appear moribund, they still retain state power, a modicum of elite influence and a capacity to exploit internal divisions among their adversaries.

The anti-neoliberal opposition demonstrates its strength in challenging socio- economic policies but have difficulty in formulating an alternative political economic strategy for state power. Financial editors worry that pressure is building for a social explosion –a reply of Argentina 2001, when the President fled in a helicopter.

Global Warming Pushing Alpine Species Higher And Higher

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For every one-degree-Celsius increase in temperature, mountaintop species shift upslope 100 metres, shrinking their inhabited area and resulting in dramatic population declines, new research by University of British Columbia zoologists has found.

The study–the first broad review of its kind–analyzed shifts in elevation range in 975 populations of plants, insects and animals.

“Most mountaintop species we looked at are responding to warming temperatures by shifting upslope to live in cooler environments. As they move towards the mountaintop, the area they live within gets smaller and smaller. This supports predictions that global warming could eventually drive extinctions among species at the top,” said Benjamin Freeman, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the UBC Biodiversity Research Centre.

The study found that most mountaintop species have moved upward, including, the northern pocket gopher in Nevada’s Ruby Mountains lost more than 70 per cent of its inhabited area over the past 80 years as a 1.1-degree temperature increase drove populations upslope. The mountain burnet butterfly in the French Pyrenees adjusted to a one-degree temperature increase by shifting upslope 430 metres–losing 79 per cent of its range over the past 50 years. An alpine meadow flower in the Himalayas moved upslope more than 600 metres as temperatures rose more than 2.2 degrees in the past 150 years. It lost 29 per cent of its habitat in the region.

The research also found that a few species, such as the white-crowned sparrow in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains in California, moved their entire range down mountains.

“This highlights how complicated responses to climate change are likely to be,” said Anna Hargreaves, an assistant professor at McGill University who worked on the study as a postdoctoral researcher at UBC.

“We might be able to predict what happens on average, but predicting how any particular species will respond is a serious challenge. We should be treasuring, archiving and protecting historical data and long-term studies that give us baselines to see how the world is changing.”

The research analyzed data from 23 previous surveys and studies, largely conducted over the past 50 years.

“Changes in species’ geographical ranges are likely to have important implications for conservation,” said Julie Lee-Yaw, study co-author and postdoctoral researcher with the UBC department of botany.

“The decreases we’re seeing at high elevations mean that the area of suitable habitat is getting smaller, and we may start to see declines in the number of individual animals a given mountain can support. It’s important to study how these shifts are affecting population sizes.”

The findings were published in Global Ecology and Biogeography.


US Wildfire Smoke Deaths Could Double By 2100

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The number of deaths associated with the inhalation of wildfire smoke in the U.S. could double by the end of the century, according to new research.

A new study simulating the effects of wildfire smoke on human health finds continued increases in wildfire activity in the continental United States due to climate change could worsen air quality over the coming decades. The number of human deaths from chronic inhalation of wildfire smoke could increase to more than 40,000 per year by the end of the 21st century, up from around 15,000 per year today.

Wildfire smoke is composed of a mixture of gases and microscopic particles from burned material known as particulate matter. Particulate matter from wildfire smoke often reaches nearby communities and can irritate human eyes, exasperate respiratory systems and worsen chronic heart and lung diseases, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Exposure to particulate matter is associated with visibility degradation, premature death in people with heart or lung disease, heart attacks, irregular heartbeats, aggravated asthma, decreased lung function  and increased respiratory symptoms, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Older adults, children and those with heart or lung diseases are most at risk.

Researchers used global climate model simulations to estimate particulate matter’s impacts on air quality and human health in the contiguous United States in the early-, mid-, and late-21st century under different climate scenarios. The new study, published in GeoHealth, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, provides the first estimates of future smoke health and visibility impacts using a predictive land-fire model.

Emissions of particulate matter from human activities–such as burning fossil fuels–are declining nationwide, but wildfires are increasing in frequency and intensity because of climate change, according to the study. From January to July 2018, NOAA recorded 37,718 fires that burned 4.8 million acres of land. In 2017, the U.S. Forest Service’s wildfire suppression costs reached a historic high of $2.4 billion.

The new study finds the number of deaths attributable to total particulate matter from all sources will decrease by the end of the 21st century, but the number of deaths attributable to fire-related particulate matter could double under the worst climate scenarios.

This new finding highlights the need to prepare for future air quality changes caused by wildfires in the U.S., according to the study’s authors.

“We know from our own research and many, many other groups that smoke has negative impacts on human health,” said Jeff Pierce, associate professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and co-author of the new study. “With the knowledge that fires have been increasing in parts of the U.S., we wanted to look at how bad this might get.”

Looking Forward

In the new study, Pierce and his team analyzed the potential effects of wildfire smoke on human health over the coming decades.  They simulated the impacts of changing fire emissions on air quality, visibility, and premature deaths in the middle to late 21st century under different climate scenarios.

They found that declines in particulate matter from human sources like car, industry and power plant emissions over the 21st century is offset by increases in smoke emissions from more intense wildfires, causing an increase in particulate matter in some regions. In the study, researchers used simulated concentrations of particulate matter generated by a model for early-, mid- and late-century time frames.

The new study predicts that average visibility due to particulate matter will improve across the contiguous United States over the 21st century, but fire-related particulate matter will reduce visibility on the worst days in the western and southeastern U.S. Haze from wildfire smoke affects how people see colors, forms and textures of a given vista or skyline. The fine particles in the air absorb and scatter sunlight, making it difficult to see clearly, according to the National Park Service.

From 2000 to 2010, approximately 140,000 deaths per year, or 5 percent of total deaths, were attributable to total particulate matter. Of those deaths, about 17,000, or 0.7 percent per year, were linked to particulate matter from wildfires. In the paper, the authors estimate uncertainties in these numbers.

The new study estimates fire-related particulate matter deaths could more than double by the end of the century in the worst-case-scenario prediction model.

“People could use this information as sort of a first estimate of what to prepare for in terms of future air quality,” Pierce said. “We need more simulations to be able to assess the different probabilities of what the future might be.”

Although there are increased efforts in place to reduce wildfire risks in the U.S., the occurrence of wildfires has continued to increase in frequency and intensity, which are strongly linked to a changing climate, according to the study.

To continue reducing the health burdens due to fire-related particulate matter, the study’s authors call for more emphasis on reducing exposure through public health campaigns in conjunction with climate mitigation efforts.

“I think that we need to act now,” said Sheryl Magzamen, associate professor of epidemiology at Colorado State University, who was not involved in the new study. “Our exposure to wildfire smoke is only going to get worse going into the next century, so we need to plan and be prepared in terms of acting to protect population health.”

The Universality Of Shame

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Shame on you. These three simple words can have devastating effect on an individual’s psyche.

But why is that? How is the feeling of shame generated, and what is its purpose? Some theorists argue that feeling shame is a pathology, a condition to be cured. Others dismiss it as a useless, ugly emotion.

A research team at the University of Montreal and UC Santa Barbara’s Center for Evolutionary Psychology (CEP), however, suggest something altogether different. Shame, they argue, was built into human nature by evolution because it served an important function for our foraging ancestors.

Living in small, highly interdependent bands, the researchers explain, our ancestors faced frequent life-threatening reversals, and they counted on their fellow band members to value them enough during bad times to pull them through. So being devalued by others — deemed unworthy of help — was literally a threat to their survival. Therefore, when considering how to act, it was critical to weigh the direct payoff of a potential action (e.g., how much will I benefit by stealing this food?) and against its social costs (e.g., how much will others devalue me if I steal the food — and how likely is it that they will find out?) became critical.

The researchers hypothesized that the intensity of anticipated shame people feel is an internally generated prediction of just how much others will devalue them if they take a given action. Moreover, if this feature was part of human nature, it should be observed everywhere — in every culture.

To test for universality, they selected a linguistically, ethnically, economically and ecologically diverse set of cultures scattered around the world. In these 15 traditional, small-scale societies, the researchers found that the intensity of shame people feel when they imagine various actions (stealing, stinginess, laziness, etc.) accurately predicts the degree to which those actions would lead others in their social world to devalue them. Their findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Function of Feelings

“In a world without soup kitchens, police, hospitals or insurance, our ancestors needed to consider how much future help they would lose if they took various actions that others disapprove of but that would be rewarding in other ways,” said lead author Daniel Sznycer, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Montreal. “The feeling of shame is an internal signal that pulls us away from acts that would jeopardize how much other people value our welfare.”

Noted Leda Cosmides, a professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara, co-director of the CEP and a co-author of the paper, “For this to work well, people can’t just stumble about, discovering after the fact what brings devaluation. That’s too late. In making choices among alternative actions, our motivational system needs to implicitly estimate in advance the amount of disapproval each alternative action would trigger in the minds of others.”

A person who did only what others wanted would be selected against, the authors point out, because they would be completely open to exploitation. On the other hand, a purely selfish individual would be shunned rapidly as unfit to live with in this highly interdependent world — another dead end.

“This leads to a precise quantitative prediction,” said John Tooby, a professor of anthropology at UC Santa Barbara, CEP co-director and a coauthor of the paper. “Lots of research has shown that humans can anticipate personal rewards and costs accurately, like lost time or food. Here we predicted that the specific intensity of the shame a person would anticipate feeling for taking an action would track how much others in their local world would negatively evaluate the person if they took that specific act.

“The theory we’re evaluating,” he continued, “is that the intensity of shame you feel when you consider whether to take a potential action is not just a feeling and a motivator; it also carries vital information that seduces you into making choices that balance not only the personal costs and benefits of an action but also its social costs and benefits. Shame takes the hypothetical future disapproval of others, and fashions it into a precisely calibrated personal torment that looms the closer the act gets to commission or discovery.”

A Universal Human Quality

According to the authors, shame — like pain — evolved as a defense. “The function of pain is to prevent us from damaging our own tissue,” said Sznycer. “The function of shame is to prevent us from damaging our social relationships, or to motivate us to repair them if we do.”

As a neural system, shame inclines you to factor in others’ regard alongside private benefits so the act associated with the highest total payoff is selected, the authors argue. A key part of the argument is that this neurally based motivational system is a part of our species’ biology. “If that is true, we should be able to find this same shame-devaluation relationship in diverse cultures and ecologies all around the world, including in face-to-face societies whose small scale echoes the more intimate social worlds in which we think shame evolved,” Sznycer noted.

To test this hypothesis, the team collected data from 15 traditional small-scale societies in four continents. The people in these societies speak very different languages (e.g., Shuar, Amazigh, Icé-tód), have diverse religions (e.g., Hinduism, Shamanism), and make a living in different ways (e.g., hunting, fishing, nomadic pastoralism). If shame is part of universal, evolved human nature, the research should find that the emotion closely tracks the devaluation of others, for each specific act, in each community; but if shame is more akin to a cultural invention like agriculture or the alphabet, present in some places but not others, they should find wide variation from place to place in this relationship. Indeed, anthropologists have long proposed that some cultures are guilt-oriented, some are fear-oriented, and some are shame-honor.

Yet, the authors found the predicted relationships everywhere they tested. “We observed an extraordinarily close match between the community’s negative evaluation of people who display each of the acts or traits they were asked about and the intensities of shame individuals anticipate feeling if they took those acts or displayed those traits,” Sznycer said. “Feelings of shame really move in lockstep with the values held by those around you, as the theory predicts.”

Further studies, he added, have demonstrated that it is specifically shame — as opposed to other negative emotions — that tracks others’ devaluation. “Moral wrongdoing is not necessary,” said Sznycer. “In other research we showed that individuals feel shame when others view their actions negatively, even when they know they did nothing wrong.”

Of interesting note, anticipated shame mirrored not only the disapproval of fellow community members, but also the disapproval of (foreign) participants in each of the other societies. For example, the shame expressed by the Ik forager-horticulturalists of Ikland, Uganda, mirrored not only the devaluation expressed by their fellow Iks, but also the devaluation of fishermen from the Island of Mauritius, pastoralists from Khövsgöl, Mongolia, and Shuar forager-horticulturalists of the Ecuadorian Amazon. What’s more, shame mirrored the devaluation of foreigners living nearby in geographic or cultural space just as well as it mirrored the devaluation of foreigners living farther and farther away — another indication of shame’s universality.

Sri Lanka: Cementing Reconciliation – Analysis

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By S. Binodkumar Singh*

On September 5, 2018, the Office on Missing Persons (OMP) handed its interim report to President Maithripala Sirisena at the Parliament. OMP Chairman Saliya Peiris handed over the report to the President recommending that the Government provide urgent and immediate relief to the families of the involuntarily disappeared, as their current socio-economic situation was dire; the implementation of a financial aid programme to provide a monthly allowance of SLR 6000 to the surviving spouse, children and parents of these missing persons, who have no permanent income; introduction of a scholarship scheme under the Ministry of Education for the children of missing persons in the form of a monthly allowance of SLR 2000 to cover essential education expenses required for the completion of their primary and secondary education; and the introduction of an employment quota of one percent within the state sector for family members of the missing.

The OMP was operationalized on March 13, 2018, to determine the status of all persons who went ‘missing’ during the civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). According to the Paranagama Commission Report, around 21,000 people went missing during the civil war. Accepting the fact that enforced disappearances had occurred in the country, on August 30, 2018, OMP Chairman Pieris, at an event to mark the International Day of the Enforced Disappearances at the J. R. Jayawardene Centre in Colombo, observed

If we speak of the numbers of missing in Sri Lanka, it is one of the highest not only in Asia but also in the world. We have to accept that people had been forcibly disappeared for at least four decades. Accepting this is the only way to achieve reconciliation.

Significantly, to expand national unity and reconciliation projects island-wide, and to create a discourse on reconciliation at the grass roots level, the Office for National Unity and Reconciliation (ONUR) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with 22 Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) on July 3, 2018. The ONUR Director General M.S Jayasinghe and respective officials of CSOs participated in the signing. The main objective of the MoU was to expand the “Heal the Past, Build the Future” project in 17 selected Districts. The chosen Districts are Jaffna, Anuradhapura, Ratnapura, Ampara, Mannar, Galle, Kalutara, Kilinochchi, Kurunegala, Matara, Monaragala, Nuwara, Eliya, Batticaloa, Trincomalee, Mullaitivu and Vavuniya.

Meanwhile, the Office for Reparations Bill ratified by the Cabinet on June 13, 2018, for the payment of reparations to war-affected and missing persons, was submitted to Parliament on July 17, 2018. However, on August 7, 2018, the Supreme Court shot down two clauses of the Bill on the grounds that they vested judicial powers in the Office for Reparations. According to the Court, Sections 27 (a) and 27 (A) (iii) of the Bill were inconsistent with Sections 4 (D) and Section 3 of the Constitution and therefore the Court stated that the Bill has to be approved by a two-thirds majority of the total number of members in the Parliament, in order to bring about a Constitutional amendment. The SC also recommended that the Bill should be approved by the people through a referendum and that the inconsistency could be removed if amendments were made in line with the directions it had given.

On the other hand, underlining the importance of the Office for Reparations, the OMP Interim Report noted

The proposed Office for Reparations will play a critical role in providing redress to victims of the missing and the disappeared as well as others affected by the conflict. An independent Office for Reparations with a robust mandate and strong implementation powers is urgently required. The OMP urges all Members of Parliament to strengthen the Office for Reparations Bill and ensure its prompt enactment and operationalisation.

On July 30, 2018, in an effort to accelerate development projects launched in the war-affected North and East, President Maithripala Sirisena appointed a Presidential Task Force and convened its first meeting at his Office. The Task Force, chaired by the President, consists of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, 15 Cabinet Ministers, Governors, the Chief Ministers of the two provinces, together with the Tri Forces Commanders. At the meeting, the President emphasized that development programs should be implemented in a systematic and efficient manner to provide the people in the region with immediate benefits. Further, on August 27, 2018, President Sirisena convening the Presidential Task Force for the second time at the Presidential Secretariat, assured equal development in Northern and Eastern Provinces. During the meeting, the President instructed the officials to take measures to streamline and accelerate the infrastructure development programs of the North and the East and the programs implemented to uplift the livelihood of the people.

Separately, on July 11, 2018, the Government launched a long-term development plan for the Eastern port city of Trincomalee and surrounding cities in the island’s Eastern Province. The long-term plan to develop the port city under the theme “Eastern gateway to Sri Lanka by 2050″ was presented to the Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe at Temple Trees. Under this project, Trincomalee will be developed as the main export center for the Bay of Bengal region, with eco-friendly industrial zones, agricultural zones and tourism. Highways, transport, education, health and other facilities are planned to be built and it is envisaged to generate more than a million new jobs.

Meanwhile, encouraging entrepreneurs in North with tax concessions to help lift the local economy, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe noted, at an event held at Jaffna Municipal Grounds in Jaffna District of Northern Province on July 22, 2018, “We want local entrepreneurs to invest as well as bringing the enterprises to the region from outside. That money should be invested in Jaffna. We will give money if you start from inside the region.” Further, Prime Minister Wickremesinghe, participating as the Chief Guest at the opening ceremony of several new buildings constructed at the Kilinochchi Campus of Jaffna University on August 4, 2018, declared, “Steps are being taken to provide a better life for the youth through a massive development program from Point Pedro in the North to Hambantota in the South. The accelerated development program has already been commenced from the Northern Province with the construction of an airport in Kilinochchi and the development of Kankasanthurai harbor.”

In keeping with the Government’s policy to release more security forces-held lands to civilians, the Army released another 4.4 acres in the Valikamam North Divisional Secretariat area in Jaffna District on September 6, 2018, during a ceremony at Myliddy Town. The Army released a land patch of 2.75 acres, belonging to the Kalaimagal Vidyalayam, Myliddy North; a stretch of 1.19 acres, belonging to several families in Sandilipay area; another block of 0.5 acres, owned by Kurumbachetti Co-operative Shop; and the Community Hall to the Zonal Education Director and the District Secretary for Jaffna, N. Vethanayahan, enabling both of them to go ahead with onward arrangements for issue of their legitimate deeds, certificates, etc through the District Secretariat. As of December 2017, the Army had released a total of 55,643.92 acres of land in Jaffna, Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu, Mannar and Vavuniya Districts in the Northern Province. The Army commenced the gradual release of private property used by the armed forces after the conclusion of the Eelam War on May 17, 2009.

On September 7, 2018, a Select Committee was appointed to study and recommend ways and means of ensuring ethnic and religious harmony in Sri Lanka. The Committee, headed by Speaker Karu Jayasuriya, includes the Deputy Speaker Ananda Wijesiri, and Opposition Leader R. Sampathan, as well as sitting Members of Parliament Rauff Hakeem, D. M. Swaminathan, Susil Premajayantha, Dinesh Gunawardene, C. B. Ratnayake, Vijitha Herath, Douglas Devananda, Selvam Adekaranathan, Gamini Jayawickrama Perera, Gayantha Karunatilleke, Mano Ganesan, Wijedasa Rajapakshe, Ali Zahir Mawlana, John Amaratunga, Thalatha Athukorala and Ranjith Madduma Bandara. The Committee will also look at ways of preventing the propagation of defamatory views that undermine national harmony or the engagement in such activities, as well as the necessity of taking legal action against individuals who engage in such activities. It will also examine the suitability of including hate speech as a crime in the Penal Code; categorizing the schools system on non-racial or non-religious bases; establishing a parliamentary committee empowered to entertain complaints about the issues faced by minority ethnic groups in the North and the East; formulating relevant legal provisions required for general implementation of the law when establishing places of worship and erecting statues; and the possibility of banning news which disturb national amity.

Expressing satisfaction on the progress of Sri Lanka’s reconciliation process and the measures taken by the Government, representatives of several donor agencies, during a meeting with President Maithripala at the President’s Residence on September 5, 2018, expressed their readiness to extend their fullest support to Sri Lanka’s efforts to achieve goals of development and reconciliation. The donor agencies include the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the World Bank (WB), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA). Earlier, Filippo Grandi, the head of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) while meeting with Ambassador A.L.A. Azeez, Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations (UN) at the UNHCR Headquarters in Geneva, on August 15, 2018, commended Sri Lanka for its significant progress in resettlement of returning refugees and Internally Displaced Persons and invited Sri Lanka to play a more proactive role in the organization. Meanwhile, newly-appointed UN Permanent Representative for Sri Lanka, Hanna Singer, while calling on President Sirisena at his official residence in Colombo on September 6, 2018, assured the President that, even as ongoing programmes continued, she would explore the possibility of widening assistance to Sri Lanka.

The National Unity Government, formed on August 20, 2015, has made remarkable efforts to press forward with the reconciliation process. The OMP Interim Report, to help the families of missing is another significant step in this direction. Challenges remain, of course, as the Government is yet to consider the recommendations listed in the comprehensive report and a special Cabinet sub-committee would be needed for this purpose.

*S. Binodkumar Singh

Research Associate, Institute for Conflict Management

India: Tightening Vice In Narayanpur, Chhattisgarh – Analysis

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By Deepak Kumar Nayak*

On September 2, 2018, at least four cadres of the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist), including a Local Organization Squad (LOS) ‘commander’, were killed in an encounter with District Reserve Guard (DRG) personnel in a forest near the Gumiyabeda village under Maad Police Station limits in Narayanpur District. During a subsequent search of the spot, four bodies, including one of a woman cadre, were recovered, of which two were identified; one of the these as Somlu, the Nelnar ‘area committee member (ACM)’; the other, a woman cadre, identified as Ratti, the ‘commander’ of the Jhara LOS. DRG personnel recovered four weapons, including one INSAS (Indian Small Arms System) assault rifle, one .303 rifle and two 12-bore guns.

On August 26, 2018, a Maoist cadre was killed in an exchange of fire between Security Forces (SFs) and the Maoists in a forest near Kalepal village under Benoor Police Station limits in Narayanpur District. Acting on information about the presence of rebels between Chinari and Kalepal villages, around 350 kilometers from State capital Raipur, a team of DRG personnel had been sent to the spot, which came under fire from the Maoists near Kalepal leading to a gun battle, Superintendent of Police (SP), Jitendra Shukla disclosed. After a brief exchange of fire, the Maoists fled and the body of Soma Vadde, a member of the CPI-Maoist’s Bayanar LOS, was recovered from the spot, along with a country-made gun.

According to partial data collated by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), at least seven Maoists have been killed in Narayanpur District thus far in 2018 (data till September 9). During the corresponding period in 2017, 15 Maoists had been eliminated; a total of 21 Maoists fatalities were recorded through 2017. 16 Maoists fatalities were recorded in 2016, while three were registered in 2015; five in 2014; five in 2013; three in 2012; 12 in 2011; and 15 in 2010.

In addition, operations launched against the rebels have resulted in the arrest of at least 57 Maoists in Narayanpur District in 2018, thus far (data till September 9). During the corresponding period in 2017, at least 25 Maoists were arrested, and a total of 42 were arrested through 2017. Another at least 32 Maoists were arrested in 2016; there were no arrests in 2015; 73 in 2014; 34 in 2013; 14 in 2012; 43 in 2011; and 25 in 2010. Some of the significant arrests this year include: a militia ‘commander’ identified as Guddu Ram Wadde (29), carrying a reward of INR 100,000 on his head, was arrested along with four other cadres from the forests of Balebeda village in the District on July 12, 2018; and two CPI-Maoist cadres identified as Sukhram Usendi (40), who was active as head of the Aderbeda Janatana Sarkar (‘people’s government’) squad of CPI-Maoist, carrying a reward of INR 100,000 on his head, and Janila Mandavi (30), who was working as the head of the Toyameta Dandakaranya Adivasi Kisan Majdoor Sangathan (DAKMS), a frontal organisation of CPI-Maoist, also carrying a reward of INR 100,000 on her head, were arrested along with 14 other cadres at the villages of Musnar, Toyameta, Pugarpal and Irpanar in the Chhotedongar Police Station area in the District on June 13, 2018.

Besides, mounting SF pressure also led to the surrender of 75 Maoists in 2018 (till September 9), according to SATP data. During the corresponding period in 2017, 215 Maoists had surrendered, and a total of 218 through 2017. In the current year, importantly, on June 30, 2018, Santu Ram Vadde aka Karan (21), ‘deputy commander’ of the CPI-Maoist Dandakaranya communication team, carrying a reward of INR 500,000 on his head, surrendered before Vivekanand Sinha, Inspector General of Police (IGP), Bastar range, and officials of the Indo Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), along with nine other cadres in Narayanpur District; and on April 26, 2018, Sukhraj Kawachi (22), Sannu Ram Potai (18) and Jaisu Vadda (25), all Jan Militia (‘people’s army’) ‘commanders’, surrendered before IGP, Bastar Range, Vivekanand Sinha and ITBP officials at Narayanpur Police Station along with 57 other cadres, claiming that they were frustrated with exploitation, atrocities and violence at the hands of senior Maoist leaders, and wanted to see development reach their areas.

Meanwhile, according to SATP data, at least four SF personnel were killed in Narayanpur District in 2018 (till September 9), as against a single fatality, during the corresponding period, in 2017; the same lone fatality remained through 2017. Total SF fatalities in 2017 were the lowest recorded in this category in the District. Just one fatality in this category in the District was also recorded in 2007, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2016. A high of 27 fatalities in this category was recorded in the District in 2010.

SFs have managed to secure a positive kill ratio over the Maoists, since 2011, when the SF:Maoist ratio was 1:2. In subsequent years, the ratio has been: 1:3 in 2012; 1:5 in 2013; 1:5 in 2014; 1:1.5 in 2015; 1:16 in 2016; 1:21 in 2017; and 1:1.75 in 2018 [till September 9]. The overall SF:Maoist ratio in Narayanpur, since its creation in May 11, 2007 averages out at 1:1.54.

Meanwhile, civilian fatalities, a crucial index of the security situation in an area, have dropped to just one in the current year, thus far (data till September 9, 2018). During the corresponding period in 2017, at least three civilians were killed in the District; and this remained the total number in this category through 2017. There has been a great improvement with regard to the civilian fatalities in the current year as compared to a peak of six fatalities in this category in 2007. Civilian fatalities have seen a cyclical trend in the District and the low of a single fatality was registered in the current year as well as in 2008, 2011, and 2014.

Fatalities in Narayanpur District and Chhattisgarh: 2007*- 2018**

Year

Narayanpur
Chhattisgarh
Narayanpur’s share in % of Total killing
Civilians
SFs
Maoists
Total
Civilians
SFs
Maoists
Total

2007

6
1
4
11
95
182
73
350
3.14

2008

1
15
7
23
35
67
66
168
13.69

2009

0
6
4
10
87
121
137
345
2.89

2010

2
27
15
44
72
153
102
327
13.45

2011

1
6
12
19
39
67
70
176
10.79

2012

0
1
3
4
26
36
46
108
3.70

2013

0
1
5
6
48
45
35
128
4.68

2014

1
1
5
7
25
55
33
113
6.19

2015

3
2
3
8
34
41
45
120
6.66

2016

4
1
16
21
38
36
133
207
10.14

2017

3
1
21
25
32
55
53
125
15.2

2018

1
4
7
12
38
44
94
176
6.81

Total

22
66
102
190
569
906
912
2387
7.95
Source: SATP, *Data till September 9, 2018.
* Narayanpur carved out on May 11, 2007.

Narayanpur District, one of Chhattisgarh’s 27 Districts, was created on May 11, 2007, having been carved out from the erstwhile Bastar District. This District comprises of 366 villages, and has an area of 6,640 square kilometres. Narayanpur abuts Bijapur and Dantewada Districts in the south; Bastar in the East; Kanker District in the North; and the Gadchiroli District of Maharashtra in the west. Surrounded with dense forests, hills, streams, waterfalls and natural caves, the forest cover of 2,116.915 square kilometres accounts for 32.87 per cent of the Narayanpur’s total area. As a result of the difficult terrain and natural protection it offers, Narayanpur has immense ‘geo-strategic importance’ for the Maoists, and has long served as a major transit route for the rebels to cross into the Naxalite affected areas of the neighbouring State of Maharashtra, creating opportunities to orchestrate violence on both sides of the State borders.

On July 30, 2018, in an interview, DM Awasthi, Special Director General, anti-Naxal Operations, who also heads the Special Intelligence Branch (SIB) dealing with Left Wing Extremist (LWE), while sharing details on the present scenario, plans and strategy, for Chhattisgarh, thus discloses;

A large swathe of the hilly and forested terrain of Abujhmaad in the Narayanpur District, which shares a border with Maharashtra, is under Maoist control. Our ultimate target is to breach this core area in Abujhmaad, which is still inaccessible to a large extent.

On the other hand, other parameters of violence suggest that the Maoists are struggling to recover in their previous area of dominance, with Maoists-related incidents recording a declining trend. The Maoists were involved in at least nine incidents of exchange of fire with SFs in 2018, as compared to 10 such incidents over the same period in 2017. Through 2017 the number totalled 12 such incidents. The Maoists engineered one incident of an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) blast in the current year, and one in the same period of 2017. However, there were three such incidents through 2017. SFs recovered arms on at least three occasions in 2018, whereas, at least seven incidents of recovery of arms are on record in the corresponding period of 2017; a total of eight such incidents were recorded through 2017.

The Maoists also were involved in incidents of arson on at least three occasions in 2017, and damaged at least one under-construction primary school in 2017. No such incidents have been recorded in the current year.

To fight the Maoists through development programmes in the region, Chief Minister Raman Singh announced during his visit to Narayanpur District on May 14, 2018, that a District and Sessions Court would soon be opened in Narayanpur. In addition, other developmental initiatives announced include:

  • Sanction of INR Five million for Ambedkar Park;
  • Permission for widening of three kilometres long main road of Narayanpur District headquarters and starting of bus service from capital city Raipur to Orchha (Abujhmaad);
  • Laying of the foundation stone for 77 different development and construction works worth nearly INR 2.2334 billion for development of the District;
  • Laying of the foundation of 175 kilometre-long roads worth nearly INR 900 million under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) scheme;
  • Kendriya Vidyalaya building in the District;
  • Livelihood College building in Orchha block headquarters;
  • Power sub-station of 33 KV capacity at Nelvada;
  • Power sub-station of 33/11 KV capacity in Akabeda and Orchha.
  • Building of Orchha Tehsil (revenue district) Office and Girls Hostel.

Narayanpur, along with seven other Districts (Bastar, Bijapur, Dantewada, Kanker, Kondagaon, Rajnandgaon and Sukma) of Chhattisgarh, are worst Maoist-afflicted Districts, and are listed among the 30 Districts across seven States which the worst affected by LWE violence. These 30 Districts accounted for 88 per cent to all violent incidents and 94 per cent to all Maoist-linked deaths in 2017, according to the Union Home Ministry (UHM) on August 1, 2018. UHM further disclosed;

Resolute implementation of the National Policy and Action Plan (NPAP) by the Central and State Governments has resulted in considerable improvement of the situation both in terms of reduction of violence and the geographical spread. The number of violent incidents has come down to 908 in 2017 from a high of 2,258 in 2009. The geographical spread of violence has also shrunk considerably.

The Maoists are taking a beating in the State and across the country. It is imperative at this juncture, that the Maoist heartland areas of Abujhmaad in Narayanpur and beyond, have to be brought under control through augmenting SF pressure on the rebels, and effective, time-bound implementation of the developmental policies by the both the State and Union Governments.

*Deepak Kumar Nayak
Research Assistant, Institute for Conflict Management

Putin Meets With Japan’s Abe, Pledges ‘Close Contacts’ On North Korea

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(RFE/RL) — Russian President Vladimir Putin held talks with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, discussing North Korea’s nuclear program and other issues in the first of several planned meetings with visiting Asian leaders.

Following his September 10 talks with Abe in the Russian far eastern port city of Vladivostok, Putin said they had exchanged views on “important international issues” and that Moscow and Tokyo would “continue tight contacts to foster inter-Korean dialogue.”

Abe arrived in Vladivostok earlier in the day ahead of an economic forum that Russia is hosting on September 11-13 in the city. Chinese President Xi Jinping and South Korean Prime Minister Lee Nak-yeon will attend the forum and meet with Putin later this week.

The meetings in Vladivostok come a week ahead of a planned summit between North and South Korea to be held September 18-20 in Pyongyang.

Washington has expressed disappointment with Pyongyang’s lack of progress toward denuclearization, though U.S. President Donald Trump praised North Korea for not displaying its intercontinental ballistic missiles at a massive military parade it staged on September 9.

Valentina Matviyenko, the speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, said North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had been invited to this week’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok but would not attend.

Matviyenko, who met Kim in Pyongyang over the weekend, told Russia’s state-run RIA news agency on September 10 that the North Korean leader said he did not have plans to take unilateral steps toward denuclearization and was awaiting a U.S. response to measures he had already taken.

Matviyenko, a loyal longtime ally of Putin, said Kim struck a diplomatic and polite tone when discussing Trump and that he expressed hope that Moscow would support Pyongyang in its efforts to weaken Washington’s sanctions against the reclusive state.

Abe said after his talks with Putin on September 10 that the two sides were moving toward a peace treaty, something they never signed after World War II amid a territorial dispute over an island chain that Tokyo calls the Northern Territories and Russia calls the Southern Kuriles.

Abe added that he had received Putin’s support on efforts to resolve the issue of North Korean kidnappings of Japanese citizens.

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