By Die Morina

The reported departure of at least one minister is seen as a sign of major rifts in the ruling coalition, in which several powerful factions are fighting for domination.

The resignation offered by one Kosovo minister and possible dismissal of two more, all considered close to President Hashim Thaci, has fuelled speculation about serious rifts in the ruling Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK, and its relations with Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj.

Analysts believe that the announced reshuffle has revealed that matters are seriously adrift behind the scenes in the ruling PDK.

Albert Krasniqi, from Kosovo Democratic Institute, KDI, a think tank, said the resignation offered on Monday by Justice Minister Abelard Tahiri – a man seen as close to Thaci – was undoubtedly coordinated with the President.

“The goals are not clear, but it might be an attempt to blackmail the government in order to get it to support the President in his intentions, both for dialogue [with Serbia] and for other purposes,” Krasniqi told BIRN.

He said another option was that it was all coordinated between Thaci and Kadri Veseli, the PDK leader and parliamentary speaker, against Haradinaj.

“While the third option may be a destabilisation effort by Thaci, as ministerial resignations and an eventual no-confidence motion against the government … would lead to blocked institutions – with the President remaining the only one with a legitimate mandate,” Krasniqi said.

PDK leader Veseli said on Tuesday that his party would not accept Tahiri’s resignation as Justice Minister, although he already offered it to Haradinaj.

“Tahiri is one of the government’s most successful ministers, and he is making major reforms in the justice system,” he said on TV on Tuesday.

“It is true that there have been challenges and he has offered a readiness to resign, but he has not resigned and continues to be a minister and will continue to carry out the reforms initiated in the justice system,” Veseli told a debate in Klan Kosova TV.

Tahiri confirmed the news through a status on his Facebook account, saying the key to his political and institutional engagement had always been “to strengthen the rule of law and to contribute to a state and modern society guided by the brightest principles of democracy and the equal opportunities and opportunities for all”.

Fresh problems within the ruling PDK surfaced after President Thaci made a surprise visit to the Ujmani/Gazivode lake in northern Kosovo on September 29.

Ministers Tahiri and Bedri Hamza were part of the unannounced visit to the lake, the same time when the opposition Vetevendosje party was protesting against Thaci.

Reportedly, the PDK ministers did not inform their party boss, Veseli, about their visit.

Following the Tahiri case, media reports have suggested that Finance Minister Bedri Hamza and Innovation Minister Besim Beqaj would also resign.

However, Veseli stated that none of his party’s ministers was resigning.

Veseli was elected PDK leader in May 2016, after Thaci who founded the party in 1999, became President of Kosovo and had to leave the post.

Another Pristina-based political analyst, Albinot Maloku, said that when Tahiri announced he was leaving the government, “a meeting was held in a hurry where the PDK leader [Veseli] said that individuals do not decide on who will or will not be a minister –provoking him to show his authority”.

Maloku said that Thaci had tried to use Tahiri “to threaten the government with ministers quitting and frighten them – shaking the position of PM Haradinaj, because of Haradinaj’s [hostile] stance on the latest border correction ideas [with Serbia] proclaimed by President Thaci”.

By Jim Garamone

NATO defense ministers are meeting in Brussels to implement the decisions made by alliance heads of state in July and to discuss burden sharing, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday.

Defense Secretary James N. Mattis will join the other NATO allies in discussing the threats from Russia and the south, as well as changes to the alliance to deal with threats from the cyber world.

Alliance members are making progress toward achieving the goal of nations spending 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense, a goal agreed upon at NATO’s 2014 summit in Wales. “Over the past two years, European allies and Canada have spent a cumulative $41 billion more on defense, and I expect allies to make good on their commitments,” Stoltenberg said.

The defense ministers will also focus on alliance deterrence and defense. The ministerial conference will feature a meeting of the Nuclear Planning Group, and will address concerns about Russian violations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed in 1987.

The ministers will review changes to the alliance command structure, which will include the addition of more than 1,200 personnel. Two new commands – one hosted in Norfolk, Virginia, and the other in Germany – will improve the movement of troops across the Atlantic and within Europe.

Cyber Operations, Partnerships

“We are also setting up our new Cyber Operations Centre, which will help us strengthen our defenses against a real and present threat,” the secretary general said. “Our top military commanders will brief us on the progress made.”

Finally, the ministers will address work with partner countries. They will discuss efforts in and around the Black Sea and the aspiration of Georgia to join the alliance.

The ministers also will review the NATO training mission in Iraq. The effort will include more than 500 troops and will help the country preserve the gains made by the global coalition to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Stoltenberg said.

Also, the ministers will meet with European Union Vice President Federica Mogherini to discuss cooperation in areas such as military mobility and managing hybrid threats. “Done in the right way, these efforts can contribute to fairer burden sharing between Europe and North America,” he said.

(RFE/RL) — Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed into law an unpopular bill raising the retirement age by five years, the Kremlin said.

The October 3 announcement came hours after the upper chamber of Russia’s parliament passed the legislation, with 149 members of the Federation Council voting in favor. Five voted against and three abstained.

In late September the lower chamber, the State Duma, passed the pension-reform bill after approving Putin’s proposal to limit the increase for women to five years instead of the eight years the legislation initially called for.

The legislation will gradually raise the retirement age for women from 55 to 60 and for men from 60 to 65.

The bill was introduced a month after Putin was sworn in for his fourth presidential term, which may be his last because the constitution bars him from running again in 2024.

Experts have warned for years that a combination of factors including life expectancy, the labor force, and long-term budget forecasts require immediate changes to Russia’s pension system.

But Putin and his government had held off on seeking changes during his previous terms in office.

In June, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev announced that the government was submitting legislation that would increase the retirement age.

The plan swiftly led to protests and dented Putin’s approval rating despite several weeks of efforts to distance himself from the idea.

Putin finally weighed in with a televised address to the nation on August 29, proposing that the retirement age for women be raised to 60 rather than 63.
With reporting by Dozhd and TASS

Over the last 30 years, Russians have become more tolerant of those who don’t pay their taxes, take bribes, use public transit without paying and illegally receive government benefits, according to a new study conducted by Anna Almakayeva and Olesay Volchenko of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics.

The two sociologists used data from the World Values Study that polled people in various countries, including Russia, in 1990, 1995, 2006, 2011, and 2017. Their full report is available at publications.hse.ru/articles/223131356. It is summarized today by Svetlana Saltanova at iq.hse.ru/news/225039321.html).

Almakayeva and Volchenko report that in 1990, 85 percent of Russians were extremely critical of those who took bribes; by 2017, only 58 percent were. In 1990, 65 percent did not approve of those who illegally received government subsidies; now only 36 percent of the sample don’t.

Similarly, they report, in 1990, 53 percent of Russians disapproved of those who didn’t pay their taxes; now only 36 percent take the same position. And while 52 percent were offended in 1990 by those who used public transport without paying, now only 24 percent say they are angry at those who don’t pay.

These trends show, Saltanova summarizes, that “residents of Russia over time have become more loyal to those who violate the law, including to bribery which is considered by them to be a more serious crime” than many others.

What is significant, the authors say, is that this trend has not been accompanied by a decline in the level of trust in the government and judicial system. “Over the last 20 years (from 1995) trust in these institutions has only increased.” Consequently, more positive attitudes toward those who violate the law is not the result of less respect for such institutions.

“This growth of tolerance” for those who violate society’s norms, Almakayeva and Volchenko say, “testifies to the fact that actions considered to be anti-social have become a behavioral norm,” something other Russians are far less inclined to condemn at least in specific cases than they were.

The authors also drew three other conclusions about Russian attitudes over this period:

• “Between 1990 and 2006, the number of citizens in Russia who signed petitions or were prepared to do so fell” to only eight percent and 23 percent respectively but have since risen to 13 and 31 percent.

• Russians throughout the period seldom joined NGOs. In 1990, only 10 percent said they had, a figure that has grown only to 16 percent at the present time.

• Over this period, friends have become more important for Russians, while trust in acquaintances and the majority of people has fallen. Attitudes toward family members remained stable and positive throughout the period.

The death of Bahrun Naim, the directing figure of terrorist attacks in Southeast Asia, demonstrates that by working together, governments can prevent and pre-empt attacks.

By Rohan Gunaratna

On June 8, 2018, Muhammad Bahrunnaim Anggih Tamtomo alias Bahrun Naim was killed in a US airstrike as he was riding a motorcycle in Ash Shafa, Syria. Naim had been the mastermind of terrorist attacks in Malaysia and Indonesia. Upon joining Islamic State (IS), he used the cyber domain to radicalise and recruit Southeast Asians to carry out attacks. After tracking Naim for close to two years, a US counter terrorism operation killed the Indonesian high-value target.

Following the rise of IS from June 2014 onwards, many Southeast Asian recruits travelled to Iraq and Syria to join the group. A significant number of failed plots and successful attacks in the region were planned by Southeast Asian terrorists located in Syria and Iraq. They included three Indonesians – Naim, Bahrumsyah and Abu Jandal – and one Malaysian, Muhammad Wanndy. They planned to direct and inspire attacks against political and security leaders.

Naim’s Background

All four masterminds have been killed – two in suicide bombings and two in decapitation attacks. On 5 November 2016, Abu Jandal was killed in a suicide mission in Mosul. On 29 April 2017, Muhammad Wanndy Mohammad Jedi alias Abu Hamzah al Fateh was killed in Raqqa, Syria. On 19 April 2018, Bahrumsyah Mennor Usman was killed at an IS meeting in a US air strike in Hajin, Syria.

There were multiple claims of their deaths including Naim faking his death to evade the aggressive coalition hunting high-value targets. While Abu Jandal and Bahrumsyah did not die in targeted killings, Wanndy and Naim’s deaths represented successful counter terrorist operations.

Naim was born in Pekalongan, Central Java on 6 September 1983 and was raised in Solo, which is regarded as the centre of Islamist radicalism in Indonesia. He had joined Hizbut Tahrir while he was a senior high school student and spoke Javanese, Indonesian and Arabic fluently. Most of his recruits came from Hizbut Tahrir and Tim Hisbah, a splinter group of the Jamaah Ansharut Tauhid (JAT).

After qualifying as an informatics engineer from Surakarta State University (UNS), he worked at an Internet cafe in Surakarta. Naim taught archery to Nurul Azmiat-Tibyani, an imprisoned female terrorist involved in the hacking of investment companies, because he believed that women are obligated to wage ‘jihad’.

In November 2010, Naim was arrested by Indonesia’s D88 for possession of ammunition in his home and was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison by Solo’s District Court in June 2011. In February 2015, he left Indonesia for Syria with his two wives and children and first stayed in Raqqa.

He then moved to the Manbij town, near Aleppo, which is also called ‘Little London’ where he interacted with foreign fighters from Europe. Together with one of his two wives, Rafiqa Hanum they ran a travel agency to move Southeast Asians to fight for IS. Although IS’ external operations wing was reluctant to support Bahrun Naim’s projects, he built a support and operational infrastructure from Indonesia to Turkey, the gateway to Iraq and Syria.

Naim in Syria

Naim was the first Southeast Asian terrorist to use Bitcoins, and basic artificial intelligence to disseminate terrorist content to future attackers and supporters. In April 2017, Naim used an internet bot in his website Wahai Muslimin, which allowed visitors an interactive and instant platform to communicate with him.

Naim’s ‘Nuclear for Dummy’ manual in his personal website inspired Indonesian terrorist Young Farmer to build a ‘dirty bomb’ aimed at Indonesian targets. Naim reminded IS supporters who pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to obey the ‘caliph’s instructions’.

Naim used encrypted communication channels, mostly Telegram and WhatsApp to plot attacks and assign missions. To counter this, the Indonesian government threatened to shut down Telegram in July 2017. However, Telegram’s representatives focused on blocking IS content to prevent the threat from escalating, which led to Naim’s account being taken down.  Naim attracted further attention after his associates led by Gigih Rahmat Dewa planned to attack Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.

Naim became elusive after he realised that he was being targeted and faked his death in May 2017 by ending communication with his supporters and sympathisers. In July 2017, Naim’s first wife Rafiqa Hanum lied to his associate Yusuf Arianto that her husband had been killed and his body had been buried.

Authorities from multiple countries believed that Bahrun Naim was killed fighting the Syrian army in Abu Hammam, Syria in November 2017. Nonetheless, he continued to operate discreetly, building social media platforms to disseminate propaganda, recruiting handlers and creating bots to spread computer generated content to large audiences.

The Future

There are emerging terrorist leaders for directing attacks from Syria and Iraq, such as Mohammed Yusop Karim Fais alias Abu Walid. Nonetheless, the death of Naim will be a hard blow to both IS central and IS regional for three reasons. First, Naim was talented in motivating his recruits and indoctrinating them to sacrifice their lives. Second, Naim was technically competent, harnessing technology to enhance terrorist capabilities. Third, Naim was hardworking, resourceful and very experienced.

Away from the glare of the international media, Southeast Asian governments disrupted multiple terrorist plots by Naim. In reality, Naim was neither a fighter nor a strategic thinker. While living in a conflict-ridden territory, he communicated securely with a laptop and limited funds to motivate his recruits to mount terrorist attacks.

*Rohan Gunaratna is head, International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR) and Professor of Security Studies, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.

Public choice theory, a subfield of economics developed extensively over the past sixty years, has sought—in the words of its foremost developer, James Buchanan—to take the romance out of the study of politics and government action.

For a long time, a public-interest theory had held sway among scholars and students of political science. In this perspective, people in the general public respond to ordinary economic incentives and seek ordinary, personal economic goals. Thus, for example, consumers seek to maximize their consumer satisfaction, or “utility,” from the consumption of normal goods and services, and they are constrained by their incomes and by the prices of goods on the market. Producers seek to maximize their wealth—the market valuation of their firms—and they are constrained by technology, the costs of inputs, and the competition of other sellers. And so forth for other private economic actors. But once a person leaves the private sector and takes up a position in the government, he is transformed from a utility or wealth maximizer into a public-spirited actor who seeks to do whatever serves the general public interest best. This idea is so prima facie preposterous and counterfactual that one wonders how anyone ever embraced it sincerely, but many people, even scholars, seem to have done so—indeed, many still appear to do so today.

Public choice analysts proposed that this theory ignores the universality of human motives. People do not become transformed from ordinary, money-grubbing actors into angels merely by entering the government. Indeed, even if they sought to do so, they could not; it would be impossible, for example, for any one of them even to know what “the public interest” consists in. Competing ideologies define the concept quite differently, and general agreement is impossible to attain even on matters so seemingly incontestable as a preference for peace rather than war. Public choice analysts proceed on the assumption that no transformation occurs when people leave the private sector and enter the government; they are as motivated by private, personal interests as they were before, and they act accordingly, though now subject to a different set of constraints.

So, public choice analysts developed models of voters, elected officials, and bureaucrats. In these models, voters seek maximum transfers of income via government redistribution, either by direct monetary transfers or by indirect transfers resulting from regulations, subsidies, tariffs, and the way in which the government spends its funds. Elected officials seek reelection. Bureaucrats seek to maximize the budgets, personnel, and discretion placed at their disposal.

Public choice analysts did not develop a standard way of analyzing the actions of judges. For the most part, judges were simply ignored. Of course, if the judges were elected, they could be analyzed in the same way as any other elected officials, but in regard to appointed judges, especially those appointed for life terms, as the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court are, public choice had little to say.

I spent some time thinking about this matter. In my own study of the growth of government, I paid considerable attention to the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, regarding it as an essential element of the story. I read many histories of the court and of particular justices, and I read many court decisions—which, by the way, are among the most intellectually contemptible works that purport to be sound, sophisticated argumentation—and I weaved the courts’ history into my overall account of how the U.S. government grew from the late nineteenth century onward. I continued to ponder the question, What do judges maximize?

Thirty years ago, I was invited to present a paper at a small conference held in Barbados on the U.S. and Caribbean countries’ constitutions. The conference was a delightful occasion, given the participation of leading judicial officials from the newly independent, former British colonies of the region. I found these men highly educated, articulate—most had been trained in London—but warm, friendly, and outgoing as people tend to be in the Caribbean. So I had a splendid time during the several days I spent with them, at social occasions and meals as well as in the conference sessions. And I took advantage of the fact that two American judges were on the program there, too. One was a judge of the California Supreme Court and the other a judge at the federal court at Philadelphia.

Over dinner one evening, I put the question to them directly: what do judges maximize? I explained how in public choice analysis it is presumed that elected officials seek reelection, voters seek income transfers, and bureaucrats seek funds, staff, and discretion. So, as a general working assumption, what should we assume judges seek?

The California judge was reluctant, or so it seemed to me, to give me a forthright answer. He answered that judges seek to do justice. This answer struck me as too much like something lifted from a public school civics textbook. Judges are human beings with beliefs, desires, and ideologies just the same as those of people in the private sector. Do they suddenly become dispassionate, angelic seekers of impartial, clearly defined justice the minute they sit behind the judicial bench? Not likely, it seems to me.

The federal judge, however, gave me what seemed a more forthright and thoughtful answer. He explained that people want to be judges in order to move the world in certain directions; they know that judges have extraordinary power to do so, especially when they make constitutional decisions about the scope and limits of government power. In effect, this judge was confirming a conclusion I had reached from my own study of the U.S. Supreme Court during the preceding years of the 1980s. (On these findings, see the historical chapters of my book Crisis and Leviathan, originally published in 1987.) In a sense, judges of constitutional courts are ideologues in chief or, as it were, the government’s chief ideologues, because they need not seek reelection nor can they do much to feather their own material nests by deciding one way or another. They are almost unique in the government’s apparatus in their degrees of freedom and unconstrained power. (At the same time, however, we must recognize that in national emergencies, particularly during wars, the judges are likely to step aside, deferring to the executive branch of the government. I describe a number of such incidents in my Crisis book.)

In a formula, we might conclude that constitutional judges seek to maximize their control over the rate and direction of socio-political change. In so doing, they of course act as their ideologies impel them, because their ideologies tell them how the world works, how it ought to work, and how the government might be employed to move it in a better or worse direction. They continue to live in the political world; they mingle with other leading figures in the government; they read the news; they are not immune to how their decisions are received by other governing officials and the general public. It is a useful myth that they seek justice, but justice is never well defined except within the framework of an ideology. Judges, therefore, illustrate perhaps as well as anything, the power of ideological convictions in shaping political, social, and economic life.

This article was published by The Beacon

By Michael Bowman

Hundreds of vigils were held across the United States Wednesday with marchers hoping to persuade senators to vote against confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Reports say the FBI has completed its latest investigation into allegations Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Dr. Christine Blasey Ford at a party when they were in high school.

Two other women also accuse Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct. The judge denies all the allegations made against him.

The FBI is expected to have over its report to lawmakers before they vote, but the report’s findings are not intended to be made public.

Late Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell set a threshold vote for Friday on Kavanaugh’s nomination, moving the Senate toward a potential confirmation roll call over the weekend.

McConnell said the FBI would deliver to the Senate the results of its investigation into claims that Kavanaugh sexually abused women. With Republicans holding a thin 51-49 majority and five senators, including three Republicans, not committed to approving Kavanaugh, the conservative jurist’s prospects of Senate confirmation remained murky.

Also Wednesday, the National Council of Churches, a coalition of 38 denominations, released a statement saying Kavanaugh should withdraw his nomination. The group’s statement said he showed “extreme partisan bias,” showing that he lacks the temperament to serve on the nation’s highest court, during his testimony last week before the Senate Judicial Committee.

More than 650 law professors from across the country also signed a letter, which will be sent to the Senate on Thursday in The New York Times, urging lawmakers to reject Kavanaugh’s nomination. Their letter said, he “displayed a lack of judicial temperament that would be disqualifying for any court, and certainly for election to the highest court of the land.”

No Democrat has come out in favor of the judge and three key Republicans have yet to commit themselves on how they plan to vote.

Those three Republicans, along with a number of other senators, have criticized President Donald Trump over his remarks at a campaign rally mocking Ford.

“His comments were just plain wrong,” Maine’s Susan Collins said Wednesday.

Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski called the remarks “wholly inappropriate and in my view unacceptable.”

Arizona’s Jeff Flake — who insisted on a weeklong delay in a confirmation vote so the FBI can have another investigation — called Trump’s remarks” appalling.”

Addressing thousands of supporters at a Mississippi rally, Trump gave his own re-enactment of Ford’s responses to questions at last week’s Senate hearing where she testified that Kavanaugh assaulted her.

“I had one beer!” he said, impersonating Ford. “How did you get home? I don’t remember. How did you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know!”

“Upstairs, downstairs where was it? I don’t know,” he said in front of laughing supporters.

Ford told Senate Judiciary Committee that, despite some memory lapses, she was “100 percent certain” it was a drunken Kavanaugh who pinned her to a bed, groped her, and put his hand over her mouth to muffle her screams for help. Kavanaugh testified he has never assaulted anyone and complained he is the victim of a “political hit” to destroy his reputation.

White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump was merely stating the facts of the case and remains confident in his nominee.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, blasted the president’s mockery of Ford as “reprehensible, beneath the office of the presidency, and beneath common decency from one person to another.”

If confirmed, Kavanaugh — an appellate judge and judicial conservative — would replace retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. The nine-member court is currently operating with eight justices.

Richard Green contributed to this report.

ISIS mastermind Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s youngest son has been killed in a Russian airstrike, it has been claimed.

Baghdadi’s son died in a bombing raid on a ‘terrorist hideout’ in a Syrian village on September 22, according to an Iraqi commander.

It comes just months after ISIS said another of the terror chief’s five children was killed fighting for the jihadists as a group of fanatics stormed a thermal power plant in Syria.

Sunday’s claim that another of Baghdadi’s sons had been killed was made by Jabbar al-Ma’mori, a commander in the paramilitary Popular Mobilization Forces, Iraqi News reported.

He is said to have told Baghdad Today: ‘We received certain information that the youngest son of IS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in an airstrike conducted by Russia on a terrorist hideout in a Syrian village two days ago.’

The commander did not name Baghdadi’s son or give his age.

In July, ISIS claimed another of his sons, Hudhayfah al-Badri, was killed during an attack on a power plant in Homs.

Al-Badri was killed in an ‘operation against the Nussayriyyah and the Russians’ the group said in a statement alongside a photo of a young man holding an assault rifle.

Nussayriyyah is the term used by ISIS for the Alawite religious minority sect of President Bashar al-Assad.

ISIS declared a cross-border ‘caliphate’ in Syria and Iraq in 2014, seizing a third of Iraq during a sweeping offensive.

The jihadists have since lost much ground to separate counter-offensives by Syrian and Iraqi forces as well as US-led operations, and the jihadist presence is now confined to a few holdouts.

The group’s leader Baghdadi, who has been pronounced dead on several occasions, is understood to be hiding in Syrian territory close to the Iraqi border, an Iraqi intelligence official said in May.

Baghdadi was said to move around with only a small group of followers

Originally from Iraq, Baghdadi has been dubbed the ‘most wanted man on the planet’ and the United States is offering a $25 million reward for his capture.

Last September, in the last voice message attributed to Baghdadi, the ISIS leader called on his fighters in Syria and Iraq to ‘resist’ their enemies.

He had four children with his first wife and a son with his second wife.

Original source

A pair of Columbia University astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Kepler Space Telescope have assembled compelling evidence for the existence of a moon orbiting a gas-giant planet 8,000 light-years away.

In a paper published in the journal Science Advances, Alex Teachey and David Kipping report that the detection of a candidate exomoon – that is, moons orbiting planets in other star systems – is unusual because of its large size, comparable to the diameter of Neptune. Such gargantuan moons do not exist in our own solar system, where nearly 200 natural satellites have been cataloged.

“This would be the first case of detecting a moon outside our solar system,” said Kipping, an assistant professor of astronomy at Columbia. “If confirmed by follow-up Hubble observations, the finding could provide vital clues about the development of planetary systems and may cause experts to revisit theories of how moons form around planets.”

In looking for exomoons, the researchers analyzed data from 284 Kepler-discovered planets that were in comparatively wide orbits, with periods greater than 30 days, around their host star. The observations measured the momentary dimming of starlight as a planet passed in front of its star, called a transit. The researchers found one instance, in Kepler 1625b, that had intriguing anomalies.

“We saw little deviations and wobbles in the light curve that caught our attention,” Kipping said.

The Kepler results were enough for the team to get 40 hours of time with Hubble to intensively study the planet, obtaining data four times more precise than that of Kepler. The researchers monitored the planet before and during its 19-hour-long transit across the face of the star. After it ended, Hubble detected a second and much smaller decrease in the star’s brightness 3.5 hours later, consistent with “a moon trailing the planet like a dog following its owner on a leash,” Kipping said. “Unfortunately, the scheduled Hubble observations ended before the complete transit of the moon could be measured.”

In addition to this dip in light, Hubble provided supporting evidence for the moon hypothesis by measuring that the planet began its transit 1.25 hours earlier than predicted. This is consistent with the planet and moon orbiting a common center of gravity (barycenter) that would cause the planet to wobble from its predicted location.

“An extraterrestrial civilization watching the Earth and Moon transit the Sun would note similar anomalies in the timing of Earth’s transit,” Kipping said.

The researchers note that in principle this anomaly could be caused by the gravitational pull of a hypothetical second planet in the system, although Kepler found no evidence for additional planets around the star during its four-year mission.

“A companion moon is the simplest and most natural explanation for the second dip in the light curve and the orbit-timing deviation,” said lead author Teachey, NSF Graduate Fellow in astronomy at Columbia. “It was a shocking moment to see that light curve, my heart started beating a little faster and I just kept looking at that signature. But we knew our job was to keep a level head testing every conceivable way in which the data could be tricking us until we were left with no other explanation.”

The moon is estimated to be only 1.5 percent the mass of its companion planet, which itself estimated to be several times the mass of Jupiter. This value is close to the mass-ratio between the Earth and its moon. But in the case of the Earth-Moon system and the Pluto-Charon system – the largest of the five known natural satellites of the dwarf planet Pluto – an early collision with a larger body is hypothesized to have blasted off material that later coalesced into a moon. Kepler 1625b and its satellite, however, are gaseous, not rocky, and, therefore, such a collision may not lead to the condensation of a satellite.

Exomoons are difficult to find because they are smaller than their companion planet and so their transit signal is weak; they also shift position with each transit because the moon is orbiting the planet. In addition, the ideal candidate planets hosting moons are in large orbits, with long and infrequent transit times. In this search, the Neptune-sized moon would have been among the easiest to first detect because of its large size.

The host planet and its moon lie within the solar mass star’s (Kepler 1625) habitable zone, where moderate temperatures allow for the existence of liquid water on any solid planetary surface. “Both bodies, however, are considered to be gaseous and therefore unsuitable for life as we know it,” Kipping said.

Future searches will target Jupiter-sized planets that are farther from their star than Earth is from the Sun. There are just a handful of these in the Kepler database. NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope could really “clean-up” in the satellite search, Kipping said. “We can expect to see really tiny moons.”

By Christine Rousselle

A recent poll has shown a drop in popularity for Pope Francis in the United States over the past year. The poll suggests that many Americans increasingly disapprove of how the pope has handled the abuse crisis.

According to a Pew Research Forum survey conducted in mid-September, fewer Americans, and specifically American Catholics, express favorable feelings about the Roman Pontiff.

The pope has enjoyed a very high favorability rating among Americans, and American Catholics, throughout his pontificate.

Throughout his papacy, Pope Francis has had a net favorable rating among American Catholics of around 80 percent, spiking at a high of 90 percent in February 2015. According to the recent poll, this total stands at 72 percent, his lowest so far.

The sharpest drop in the pope’s numbers were among those who expressed “very favorable” views of him, rather than just “favorable.”

U.S. Catholics give Francis declining marks in several aspects of his job

When Pope Francis was elected in March 2013, 43 percent of American Catholics had a “very favorable” view of his pontificate. That number rose to 62 percent in October of 2015, immediately after he visited the United States, but the most recent survey saw just 30 percent of American Catholics reporting a “very favorable” view of the pope.

American impressions of the pope appear to be tied to his percieved handling of the sexual abuse crisis. In February 2014, just under a year into his papacy, Pew found that 54 percent of American Catholics said that Pope Francis was either doing an “excellent” or “good” job of addressing the scandal. That figure stayed relatively the same through 2015, before dropping to just 31 percent last month.

Conversely, at the start of his papacy, 39 percent of American Catholics thought Pope Francis was doing an “only fair” or “poor” job at dealing with the scandal, with 15 percent saying that the pope was doing “poorly.” In September of 2018, that figure had jumped to 62 percent, with the number of people saying they believed the pope is doing “poorly” sitting at 36 percent.

The survey showed that American Catholics are also less positive about other aspects of Pope Francis’ performance, including his work spreading the Catholic faith, appointing new bishops and cardinals, and standing up for traditional values.

Since January 2018, the number of Catholics who think Pope Francis has done an “excellent” or “good” job at spreading the faith and standing up for traditional values has dropped sharply, from 81 percent to 55 percent.

When it comes to appointing bishops, only 43 percent of Americans think the pope is doing an excellent or good job at this, a 15-point drop since the beginning of the year. The percentage of people who think that Pope Francis is doing a “only fair” or “poor” job at this task has risen from 24 percent to 39 percent over the last nine months.

Villanova University Professor and Church historian Massimo Faggioli told CNA he believes there are “many factors” influencing American perceptions of the pope, including the “tragic moment of crisis” gripping the Church in the United States, as well as cultural, political, and ecclesiastical issues.

“There are expectations that the pope acts against bishops and cardinals quickly; but the pope cannot act on the basis of a grand jury report only or of media reports only,” Faggioli told CNA. “There must be a formal investigation or a process.”

Faggioli told CNA that for many people in the United States, used to a rolling newscycle, it was hard to understand why Pope Francis has taken so long to respond to emerging scadnals, such as the 11-page “testimony of former apostolic nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, something Faggioli called “obviously frustrating” for many Catholics.

“The choice of not responding immediately to the Vigano’ report is hard or impossible to understand for many in the US media culture and for those who do not consider the long-term view of the Church in Pope Francis,” Faggioli said.

When faced with a large-scale crisis, it is normal for the leadership of any institution to suffer a backlash. “This is especially true for those who tend to see in the pope the CEO of the Catholic Church,” he told CNA.

“There is also an ecclesial factor: it seems that some US Catholics are blaming pope Francis for not doing what the US bishops should do to address the abuse crisis. The pope cannot act in total disregard of the local episcopate while the USCCB is putting together an action plan.”

Overall, Faggioli warned that the drop in popularity reflected a decline in confidence not only in Francis personally but in the office of pope.

“More importantly, pope Francis’ drop in popularity in the USA is here also a drop in the popularity of the papacy itself as an institution in the USA – also of his predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI.”

While timing of the decline in papal popularity would seem correlated to the still-emerging global abuse crisis, Faggioli told CNA that Francis was the subject of “a systematic campaign of undermining coming from US conservatism.”

“The papacy has become now a partisan issue in the US Church like never before – there is an increasing political polarization in the views of US Catholics toward pope Francis, in which the abuse crisis is a very important element but that element must be seen in the context of a growing distance between Rome and US Catholicism.”

The pope’s popularity has taken a major hit in the U.S., and it is directly traceable to the way he has handled clergy sexual abuse. By a margin of two-to-one, Catholics give Pope Francis negative marks on this issue.

Over the last four years, those who rate the pope’s handling of sexual abuse as “excellent” or “good” has dropped from 54% to 31%; 62% now rate his performance as either “fair” or “poor.” Only 13% today believe he deserves an “excellent” rating, as compared to 36% who say he deserves a “poor” one.

Even among church-going Catholics, the pope does not fare well: the share who give him positive marks has been cut in half in just three years, dropping from 67% in 2015 to 34% in 2018. His rating among men and women is about the same.

This is not good news for Pope Francis. Surely his refusal to accede to the request by U.S. bishops—strongly supported by Catholics across the spectrum—to investigate how Theodore McCarrick was able to ascend the ranks of the hierarchy—is driving much of the negative perception. Unless the dossier that Rome has on McCarrick (it is said to be thick) is open to scrutiny, the optics are not likely to change.

There is one glimmer of positive news in the survey that is sure to be overlooked in many quarters. The pope’s positive rating on the issue of “standing up for traditional values” slipped dramatically from 81% among all Catholics in 2014 to 55% today; his negative numbers jumped from 15% to 35%.

What’s so good about that? It suggests that the pope’s failure to do a good job handling clergy sexual abuse is seen by Catholics as a reflection of his declining support for traditional moral values.

This matters because dissident Catholics—the ones who want the Church to change its teachings on sexuality in a more liberal fashion—find little support for their agenda among most Catholics. To put it differently, the perception that the pope is not standing up for traditional moral values (the way he is expected to) accounts for the dramatic decrease in his favorability ratings.

The logic is sound. Most homosexual priests (they are responsible for 80% of the problem) practiced restraint in the 1950s, but when the Church relaxed its guard in the 1960s and 1970s, they were given a green light to act out. Add to this the influx of homosexual seminarians during this time—driving good heterosexual men to leave—and the makings of a scandal were all but assured.

Respect for traditional moral values needs the support of everyone in the Church. Then we will see the progress that Catholics want.

Morocco should take steps to ensure compliance with its new domestic workers law, which takes effect on October 2, 2018, Human Rights Watch said. The authorities should ensure that there are robust labor inspections, provide domestic workers with improved access to an adequate dispute-resolution system, and raise awareness about the new law.

Parliament approved the law on July 26, 2016, but the authorities delayed its enforcement to pass related implementation decrees. It provides new worker protections including a requirement for a standard contract, limits on working hours, a weekly rest day, and a minimum wage. While it still offers weaker protections to domestic workers than other workers, it is an important step forward. Additional steps are needed to ensure that domestic workers can realize their rights. In a memorandum to the authorities, Human Rights Watch sets out key measures to enhance access to justice and implementing mechanisms for the new law.

“Morocco’s new domestic workers law finally provides hundreds of thousands of domestic workers with minimal protections after years of exclusion from the country’s labor law,” said Rothna Begum, senior women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “But to make these rights a reality, the authorities need to put effective systems in place to ensure compliance with the law.”

Many domestic workers live and work in their employers’ homes, hidden from the outside world, almost always in informal working arrangements, leaving them vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Human Rights Watch investigated conditions for child domestic workers – those under 18 – in Morocco in 2005 and 2012. Some workers as young as 8 – known locally as “petites bonnes” – told Human Rights Watch that their employers frequently beat and verbally abused them, would not let them go to school, and sometimes refused them adequate food. Some worked for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for as little as 100 Moroccan dirhams (US$11) per month.

The new law sets the minimum age for domestic workers at 18, with a phase-in period of five years during which 16- and 17-year-old domestic workers will be allowed to work. Under the law, domestic workers are entitled to proper labor contracts, limits to working hours, guaranteed days off and paid vacations, and a set minimum wage. Employers who violate these provisions will face financial penalties, with prison sentences for repeat offenders in some cases.

Despite these gains, the new law still offers less protection to domestic workers than the Moroccan Labor Code does for all other workers. The new law allows a maximum of 48 hours of work a week for adult domestic workers, compared with 44 for other workers, and sets a minimum wage 40 percent lower than the minimum wage for jobs in manufacturing, commercial, and free trade sectors.

Moroccan authorities should eliminate these discrepancies and guarantee domestic workers the same rights as workers covered by the labor law. In the meantime, they should act quickly to ensure that domestic workers can realize their rights under the law.

The new law provides for a conciliation process that labor inspectors can conduct between domestic workers and their employers in the case of disputes, but it does not set out time limits for resolving disputes. The law also does not deal with other barriers that impede domestic workers from accessing justice. Moroccan authorities should set time limits for the dispute resolution process, provide resources needed to make it work, offer alternative avenues of legal recourse, and consider fast-track dispute resolution systems under a set financial threshold.

In the absence of clarity under the new law, Moroccan authorities should ensure that labor inspectors have the authority and training to inspect working conditions. They should be able to enter employers’ homes, with due regard to privacy, and interview domestic workers away from their employers.

The authorities should also consider incentives for employers to register domestic workers and develop model work schedules and pay slips to ensure that employers provide documentation of working hours and payment of salaries.

A lack of awareness of the law and recourse available will limit workers’ ability to defend their rights. The authorities should work with trade unions and nongovernmental groups to raise awareness among employers and domestic workers about the law and the recourse available if problems arise. Training employers and changing social attitudes will also be key to improving working conditions.

Morocco voted in 2011 for the International Labour Organization (ILO) Domestic Workers Convention, the global treaty on domestic workers’ rights, and now should ratify it. The treaty specifies that working hours for domestic workers should be equivalent to those for other types of work and that domestic workers should be covered by minimum wage requirements. Morocco would set an example by becoming the first state party to the treaty in the Middle East and North Africa region.

“The new law is an important start, but the authorities should invest in ending the isolation and abuse of domestic workers by changing attitudes of employers, inspecting homes, and providing effective access to justice,” Begum said.

Treating dogs at a community level with systemic insecticide could considerably reduce the transmission of visceral leishmaniasis in Brazil, according to a modelling study led by ISGlobal, an institution supported by “la Caixa” Foundation. The results, published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, will help define which kind of insecticide is needed and how to apply it to achieve maximum effectiveness.

Zoonotic visceral leishmaniasis is caused by the Leishmania infantum parasite and can be lethal. It is transmitted to humans through the bite of female sand flies that feed on infected mammals, particularly dogs. In Brazil, where disease prevalence is high (more than 3,000 cases per year), the culling of infected dogs has proven inefficient in controlling parasite transmission. Treating community dogs with systemic insecticide (i.e. that enters blood circulation) could represent an alternative, although to date there are no systemic insecticides registered for use against sand flies.

In this study, the researchers developed a mathematical model to estimate the impact of systemic insecticides in dogs on the number of human infections by L. infantum, in an endemic region in Brazil. They considered different combinations of insecticide efficacy, percentage of treated dogs, and duration of insecticide activity. The model revealed that, in order to halve the number of cases, 70% of community dogs should be treated with an insecticide whose initial efficacy is of 80% and does not drop below 65% during six months. The same result can be obtained with other combinations of coverage, efficacy, and duration.

“Our model predicts that, at the community level, the use of systemic insecticides targeting the parasite’s canine reservoir could considerably reduce the number of human infections by L. infantum,” explains ISGlobal researcher and study coordinator Albert Picado, who explains that treated baits or chewable tablets could facilitate their administration. “In addition, the model results will help us define the insecticide product profile and how to apply it to maximise its effectiveness,” he adds. This will guide the development of new products or the repurposing of existing ones for their use as a public health intervention to control zoonotic visceral leishmaniasis in endemic regions.

We expect 17-year-olds to have learned a great deal starting from infancy, and yet full-grown adults have proven incapable of knowing anything about Afghanistan during the course of 17 years of U.S.-NATO war. Despite war famously being the means of Americans learning geography, few can even identify Afghanistan on a map. What else have we failed to learn?

The war has not ended.

There are, as far as I know, no polls on the percentage of people in the United States who know that the war is still going on, but it seems to be pretty low. Polling Report lists no polls at all on Afghanistan in the past three years. For longer than most wars have lasted in total, this one has gone on with no public discussion of whether or not it should, just annual testimony before Congress that this next year is going to really be the charm. Things people don’t know are happening are not polled about, which contributes to nobody knowing they are happening.

Possible reasons for such ignorance include: there have been too many wars spawned by this one to keep track of them all; President Obama claimed to have “ended” the war while explicitly and actually not ending it, and pointing this out could be impolite; a war embraced by multiple presidents and both big political parties is not a useful topic for partisan politics; very few of the people suffering and dying are from the United States; very similar stories bore journalists and editors after 17 years of regurgitating them; when the war on Iraq became too unpopular in the United States, the war on Afghanistan was fashioned into a “good war” so that people could oppose one war while making clear their support for war in general, and it would be inconvenient to raise too many questions about the good war; it’s hard to tell the story of permanent imperial occupation without it sounding a little bit like permanent imperial occupation; and the only other story that could be developed would be the ending of the war — which nobody in power is proposing and which could raise the embarrassing question of why it wasn’t done 5, 10, or 17 years ago.

The war is not the longest U.S. war ever.

Among those who know the war exists, a group I take to include disproportionately those involved in fighting it and those trying to end it, a popular claim is that it is the longest U.S. war ever. But the United States has not formally declared a war since 1941. How one picks where a war starts and stops is controversial. There is certainly a strong case to be made that the never-ending war-sanctions/bombings-war assault on Iraq has been longer than the war on Afghanistan. There’s a stronger case that the U.S. war on Vietnam was also longer, depending on when you decide it began. The war on North (and South) Korea has yet to be ended, and ending it is the top demand of a united Korean people to their Western occupiers. The centuries-long war on the indigenous peoples of North America is generally ignored, I believe, principally because those people are not legally or politically thought of as actual real people but more as something resembling rodents. And yet it is important for us to recognize that none of the wars taught in U.S. school texts took even a tiny fraction of this length of time, and that even applying the same name (“war”) to (1) things that happened for limited and scheduled durations in empty fields between soldiers with primitive weapons *and* to (2) endless aerial and high-tech assaults on people’s towns and cities is questionable.

Military glory is to glory as military justice and military music are to justice and music.

For most of the duration of this war, participation in which is supposed to be called glorious, the top cause of death in the U.S. military has been suicide. What more powerful statement can someone make against glorifying what they have been engaged in than killing themselves? And sending more people off to kill and die in order not to disrespect the people who have already killed themselves, so that they not have killed themselves “in vain,” is the definition of insanity squared — it’s insanity gone insane. That it may be common sense doesn’t change that; it just gives us the task of causing our society to go sane.

Benjamin Franklin is still right: There has never been a good war.

When it became convenient for politicians and others to present Afghanistan as “the good war,” many began to imagine that whatever had been done wrong in Iraq had been done right in Afghanistan: the war had been U.N. authorized, civilians had not been targeted, nobody had been tortured, the occupation had been wisely planned; the war had been and was just and necessary and unavoidable and humanitarian; in fact all the good war needed was more of what it was, while the bad war in Iraq needed less. None of these fantasies was true. Each was and is blatantly false.

“They started it” is always a lie, because it’s always used to start something.

Most everyone supposes that the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and has stayed there ever since as a series of “last resorts,” even though the Taliban repeatedly offered to turn bin Laden over to a third country to stand trial, al Qaeda has had no significant presence in Afghanistan for most of the duration of the war, and withdrawal has been an option at any time. The United States, for three years prior to September 11, 2001, had been asking the Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden. The Taliban had asked for evidence of his guilt of any crimes and a commitment to try him in a neutral third country without the death penalty. Those don’t seem like unreasonable demands. At the very least they don’t seem irrational or crazy. They seem like the demands of someone with whom negotiations might be continued. The Taliban also warned the United States that bin Laden was planning an attack on U.S. soil (this according to the BBC). Former Pakistani Foreign Secretary Niaz Naik told the BBC that senior U.S. officials told him at a U.N.-sponsored summit in Berlin in July 2001 that the United States would take action against the Taliban in mid-October. He said it was doubtful that surrendering bin Laden would change those plans. When the United States attacked Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, the Taliban asked to negotiate handing over bin Laden to a third country to be tried, dropping the demand to see any evidence of guilt. The United States rejected the offer and continued a war in Afghanistan for many years, not halting it when bin Laden was believed to have left that country, and not even halting it after announcing bin Laden’s death. Perhaps there were other reasons to keep the war going for a dozen years, but clearly the reason to begin it was not that no other means of resolving the dispute were available. Punishing a government that was willing to turn over an accused criminal, by spending 17 years bombing and killing that nation’s people (most of whom had never heard of the attacks of September 11, 2001, much less supported them, and most of whom hated the Taliban) doesn’t appear to be a significantly more civilized action than shooting a neighbor because his great-uncle stole your grandfather’s pig.

Tony Blair has a lot to answer for.

Blame is, contrary to popular opinion, not a finite quantity. I don’t deny an ounce of it to Bush or Cheney or every single member of the U.S. Congress except Barbara Lee, or just about every employee and owner of U.S. corporate media, or numerous profiteers and weapons dealers and death marketers of all variety. I blame history teachers, military recruiters, NATO, every member of NATO, the UN Security Council, the people who designed the UN Security Council, priests and preachers, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Hillary Clinton, Steven Spielberg, Thomas Jefferson, Wolf Blitzer, flag manufacturers, any neighbor of Paul Wolfowitz who didn’t give him a talking to, and — I’m confident in saying — a lot more people than you blame. I don’t exclude them and I am not right now ranking them. But I would like permission to point out that Tony Blair belongs in this list and not on some panel discussing the principles of liberal humanitarian slaughter. Blair was willing to go along with Bush’s attack on Iraq if Bush attacked Afghanistan first. Attacking a country because it would make marketing an attack on another country easier is a particularly slimy thing to do.

Afghanistan is Obama’s war.

Barack Obama campaigned on escalating the war on Afghanistan. His supporters either agreed with that, avoided knowing it, or told themselves that in their hero’s heart of hearts he secretly opposed it — which was apparently sufficient compensation for many when he went ahead and did it. He tripled the U.S. forces and escalated the bombings and creating a campaign of drone murder. By every measure — death, destruction, financial expense, troop deployment — the war on Afghanistan is more Obama’s war than anyone else’s.

Trump lied.

Candidate Trump said: “Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghans we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.”

President Trump escalated and continued the war, albeit at a much smaller scale than Obama had. And he had lied about the amount of money being spent. The notion that it could all be spent on useful things in the United States either underestimates the amount of money or overestimates U.S. greed and powers of imagination. This amount of money is so vast that one would almost certainly have to spend it on more than one country if spending it on useful human and environmental needs.

The people in charge of the war don’t believe in it any more than the troops they order around.

The view that further war, in particular with drones, is counterproductive on its own terms is shared by:

—U.S. Lt. General Michael Flynn, who quit as head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in August 2014: “The more weapons we give, the more bombs we drop, that just… fuels the conflict.”
—Former CIA Bin Laden Unit Chief Michael Scheuer, who says the more the United States fights terrorism the more it creates terrorism.
—The CIA, which finds its own drone program “counterproductive.”
—Admiral Dennis Blair, the former director of National Intelligence: While “drone attacks did help reduce the Qaeda leadership in Pakistan,” he wrote, “they also increased hatred of America.”
—Gen. James E. Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “We’re seeing that blowback. If you’re trying to kill your way to a solution, no matter how precise you are, you’re going to upset people even if they’re not targeted.”
—Sherard Cowper-Coles, Former U.K. Special Representative To Afghanistan: “For every dead Pashtun warrior, there will be 10 pledged to revenge.”
—Matthew Hoh, Former Marine Officer (Iraq), Former US Embassy Officer (Iraq and Afghanistan): “I believe it’s [the escalation of the war/military action] only going to fuel the insurgency. It’s only going to reinforce claims by our enemies that we are an occupying power, because we are an occupying power. And that will only fuel the insurgency. And that will only cause more people to fight us or those fighting us already to continue to fight us.” — Interview with PBS on Oct 29, 2009
—General Stanley McChrystal: “For every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies.”
— Lt. Col. John W. Nicholson Jr.: This commander of the war who left that position last month, like most of the people above, pulled “an Eisenhower” and blurted out his opposition to what he’d been doing on his last day of doing it. The war should be ended, he said.

The Afghans have not benefitted

It’s much desired in the United States to imagine that wars benefit the people bombed, and then to lament and point to their ignorant inability to feel grateful as a sign that they are in need of more bombing. In reality, this war has taken a deeply troubled and impoverished country and made it 100 times worse, killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process, creating a refugee crisis being addressed courageously by Pakistan, and helping to destabilize half the globe.

The purposes have not been admirable.

Invading Afghanistan had little or nothing to do with bin Laden or 9-11. The motivations in 2001 were in fact related to fossil fuel pipelines, the positioning of weaponry, political posturing, geo-political posturing, maneuvering toward an invasion of Iraq, patriotic cover for power grabs and unpopular policies at home, and profiteering from war and its expected spoils. These are all either indefensible arguments or points that might have been negotiated or accomplished without bombs. During the course of the war its proponents have often been quite open about its actual purpose.

Permanent bases make war permanent and do not bring peace.

They just cut the ribbon for new construction at Camp Resolute Support. Can a ground breaking at Fort Over My Dead Body be far behind. It’s important that we understand that permanent peace-bringing bases are neither.

The U.S. has no responsibility to do something before it gets the hell out.

After the United States gets out, Afghanistan will continue to be one of the worst places on earth. It will be even worse, the longer the departure is delayed. Getting out is the principle responsibility. The United States has no responsibility to do anything else first, such as negotiating the future of the Afghan people with some of their war lords. If I break into your house and kill your family and smash your furniture, I don’t have a moral duty to spend the night and meet with a local gang to decide your fate. I have a moral and legal responsibility to get out of your house and turn myself in at the nearest police station.

The ICC is teasing, but what if it starts to enjoy the teasing?

The international criminal court has never prosecuted a non-African, but has claimed for years to be investigating U.S. crimes in Afghanistan. What if people began encouraging it to do its job. Not that I would suggest such a thing.

International Criminal Court
Post Office Box 19519
2500 CM The Hague
The Netherlands
otp.informationdesk@icc-cpi.int
Fax +31 70 515 8555

Too many wars is a reason to end them.

That there are too many wars to keep track of them all is a reason to end each one and to end the entire institution of war before it ends us, as it has spiraled far out of control.

The damage is unlimited.

The damage to Afghanistan is immeasurable. The natural environment has suffered severely. Cultures have been damaged. Children have been traumatized. U.S. culture has been poisoned and militarized and made more bigoted and paranoid. We’ve lost freedoms in the name of freedom. The financial tradeoff has been unfathomable. The complete case is overwhelming.

Peace is possible. Here’s one effort to “intervene.”

A letter you can sign.

Events you can attend.

Now that it’s too late to prevent a total rightwing takeover of the Supreme Court, the Democrats pretend to be the party of opposition.

The Supreme Court nomination process is often reduced to drama and its importance reduced to irrelevancy. That is the way Democrats like Barack Obama and John Kerry acted when they were senators. They declined to use their power to filibusterand scuttle the right wing nominations they claimed were so antithetical to their beliefs. But thanks to them and other Democrats the Supreme Court is now firmly in the hands of Republican ideologues and protestations about Brett Kavanaugh are little more than kabuki theater.

The Kavanaugh nomination has as its backdrop accusations of sexual assault going back decades. This important issue is now treated as an opportunity for Democratic Party grandstanding. Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez let the cat out of the bag himself. When pressed by a reporter he admitted that the DNC wouldn’t withhold assistance to Democratic Party senators who voted to confirm Kavanaugh.

“Democratic protestations about Brett Kavanaugh are little more than kabuki theater.”

If Democrats cared about the Supreme Court they would have done a better job of protecting their senate majority and the presidency itself. Instead they hope to eke out victories while neglecting the issues that the masses of Democrats want them to advance. Democratic Party corruption is at the root of the Republican control of the senate and the courts. All of their deal making has come back to haunt them and the rest of the country.

The Republicans have also outdone themselves in providing theatrics. They send attack dogs like Lindsay Graham to make their base happy but then send Jeff Flake to play good cop and request a flimsy FBI investigation.

Democrats routinely keep leftists in line by invoking the federal judiciary. Anyone who wants peace, a protected social safety net or anything else the Democrats don’t care about is told to think about the Supreme Court and keep voting for the party that never fights for them. Democrats are the cause of most of our problems and finger pointing about lifetime appointments is just another ruse to silence anyone who is paying attention to their treachery.

“Democrats hope to eke out victories while neglecting the issues that the masses of Democrats want them to advance.”

Cory Booker and Kamala Harris get lots of face time and burnish their faux progressive credentials in regard to the sexual assault claims. Booker even made a show of releasing supposedly confidential documents which weren’t confidential because they were made public at his request.

But Kavanaugh’s role in protecting the Bush administration torture regime has taken a back seat. The Democrats don’t ask because they don’t care. Or rather they care about upholding the Democrats’ role as partners in the duopoly, including as Obama famously said “torturing folks.”

Kavanaugh says that the bulk data collection of every American’s phone calls, emails and texts is “entirely consistent” with the Constitution. He also believes that the president is kinglike, with no obligation to heed congress or the courts.This “doctrine of the unitary executive” is at least as dangerous as the possibility that he engaged in an attempted rape.

“Kavanaugh believes that the president is kinglike, with no obligation to heed congress or the courts.”

But right wing legal doctrines do not garner ratings or cries of outrage. They ought to, and as the opposition the Democrats ought to be exposing attempts to take away the few rights we have left. The Kavanaugh circus is proof that neither party is concerned about constitutional protections. When Kavanaugh helped George W. Bush legalize torture the Democrats were silent. They took a dive then and they are continuing their tradition of going along to get along.

Meanwhile the so-called resistance perform pathetic grandstanding of their own, which continues the worst of Washington’s evil doing. They may tell women to black out their social media profiles, or walk off their jobs or take part in some other symbolic act. If they were at all serious they would protest all of the rotten institutions, including the Democrats who put the federal judiciary securely in Republican hands.

If Kavanaugh didn’t exist the Democrats would have to invent him. He is the perfect target for their faux outrage and creates a smoke screen for their people to rally against without asking hard questions about how their party has been brought to irrelevance.

“When Kavanaugh helped George W. Bush legalize torture the Democrats were silent.”

In the end this Supreme Court vacancy will be filled by some dreadful right winger. If the Republicans were smarter they would have put forward a bland individual who they could confirm without raising much public attention. For now they are committed to Kavanaugh and Democrats are committed to making noise and acting for the cameras.

As Tom Perez admitted, some of them won’t even have to do that. The right wing Democrats-in-name-only can do openly what the rest of them do with pretense. Two years after their electoral debacle Democratic Party gaslighting has succeeded in silencing millions of people who ought to oppose them as much as they oppose the Republicans. Kavanaugh’s tearful testimony was not the only phony show in Washington.

Looking at Georgia’s position from a larger, regional perspective, one could think that the country is in most part defended by large geographic features. On both the western and eastern sides, you have the Black and Caspian seas (although Georgia does not border the latter), which have served Georgia well, as no foreign invader ever came by sea (well, aside from the legendary Greeks searching for that golden fleece). To the north, there are the Caucasus Mountains, through which it is extremely difficult to enter. Thus, the only natural invasion route into Georgia has been to the south, where the Lesser Caucasus Mountains lie but do not represent an insurmountable geographic feature.

This might suggest that Georgia’s position is actually enviable, but the reality is different. Although no-one thus far has invaded from the Black and Caspian seas, the two have been essentially closed to larger transoceanic trade. This did not create a need on the Georgian side to ever create a trade fleet (the defense of which might have later resulted in the creation of a military fleet) and as such, Georgia has historically remained cut off from European naval developments. The seas and mountains also diminished the ability of the Georgians to gain more territories, as there was simply no land to expand to except for a rugged southern flank.

This context is important for understanding why, throughout the centuries, Georgia developed the way it did, especially so in its relations with Russia and other neighboring countries. Although the majority in Georgia regard Russia negatively, its geographic proximity to Georgia forces the country into economic relations. Georgia’s location allows Tbilisi to be a regional transit hub, and it can’t afford to be oriented towards only one country. This also does not preclude Georgia and Russia from talking to each other and fostering said economic relations. The non-existence of diplomatic relations as well as fundamental differences regarding Abkhazia and Samachablo (South Ossetia) does not stop the Georgian government from creating closer economic contacts with Russian businesses.

It could be argued that Georgia is pursuing a clever strategy of positioning itself not as an anti-Russian state, but also not abandoning its pro-western course. The ideal scenario for Tbilisi is when all the neighboring countries have a stake in the security of Georgia. In addition, large players such as China, with its Belt and Road Initiative, the EU, the US and others are also involved in the economics of the country, creating a certain balance in the region.

This is a strategy that Georgian rulers have pursued throughout centuries: playing one big dominant neighbor against the other. The history of Georgia also teaches that the country might be enemies with a neighboring state, but geopolitics can at times mean Georgia still has to maintain relations. This is especially so nowadays, in an era of increasing interconnectedness where neighboring rival countries cannot ignore economic cooperation. Economic interconnectedness through supply chains eventually breaks down large geographic and Man-made barriers like those, for instance, created between Samachablo and the rest of Georgia.

What is the future of Georgian-Russian relations? How far could cooperation go? These are too big to answer, but it nevertheless shows that Tbilisi and Moscow have much to talk about. Both could cooperate in the security realms as well as deepening economic ties.

However, this potential limited cooperation doesn’t guarantee a rosy picture for the future of Russia-Georgia relations. Moscow is very unlikely to give up on its policy towards Samachablo and Abkhazia, while Tbilisi will remain on principle pushing for keeping its territorial integrity. Moreover, Russia has issues with Georgia’s pro-western course, as it endangers Russia’s geopolitical goals in the Caucasus.

These fundamental problems will cap any improvements in relations, which brings to mind the current essentially frozen state of relations between the two countries.

*Emil Avdaliani writes on developments in South Caucasus region and wider former Soviet space for local and international websites. This article was published at Georgia Today

Unless India accelerates the pace of the physical border infrastructure build-up, New Delhi will face serious difficulties in any future confrontation with China.

By Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan

It has been a year since India and China ended the 73-day border crisis in Doklam. And for all the focus on the crisis itself and its implications for Sino-Indian relations, it is worth recalling that along their border, Doklam is arguably an exception where the Indian military may be perceived to have a slight advantage over the Chinese military because of its slightly better infrastructure there.

Relatively speaking, however, the infrastructure on the rest of the border is quite appalling. Indeed, unless India accelerates the pace of the physical border infrastructure build-up, New Delhi will face serious difficulties in any future confrontation with China.

The Indian vice chief of army staff, in his statement to the Indian parliament’s Standing Committee on Defence, voiced serious concerns on the lack of adequate allocation of funds for the Army for 2018-19. He pointed to the “large number of Chinese strategic roads and infrastructural development along the northern borders” and made a case for bigger resource allocation, given that the sanctioned budget for infrastructure development was running massively short.

The current state of affairs with regard to the border infrastructure is the result of a flawed policy that was in place for several decades. The political, civil bureaucracy, and military leadership in India believed that building infrastructure in the Sino-Indian border area would actually compromise India’s security because it would facilitate any Chinese invasion.

In a testament to this line of thinking, the former defence minister, A.K. Antony, while addressing a function of the Border Roads Organization (BRO) in 2010, stated that “Earlier, the thinking was that inaccessibility in far-flung areas would be a deterrent to the enemies.” Acknowledging that this was an “incorrect approach,” he added that the government is now taking a number of measures to upgrade roads, tunnels, and airfields in the border areas.

Similarly, the BRO director general, Lt. Gen. A.K. Nanda, too went on record to say that the poor infrastructure in the border areas is by design but that “our approach has changed and we are building it on our capacity, modern equipment, and workforce.”

This policy underwent a change in 2006 with the Cabinet Committee on Security, a key policymaking body on national security issues within the government, taking a decision to develop 73 strategic roads along the LAC.

But more than a decade later, there is very little evidence to show on the ground. This is surprising considering that the BJP government has stressed infrastructure building, especially along the Sino-Indian border.

Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju stated in the Parliament earlier this year that infrastructure development along the border is “taken up based on threat perception, availability of resources and various other factors like terrain, altitude etc.” Speaking about the state of the Sino-Indian border areas, the director general of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), Krishna Chaudhary, said that 172 of the 176 new Border Out-Posts (BoPs) are now raised and that the work has picked up pace. He too acknowledged that India has been late in waking up to the border infrastructure requirement, but now “work has been ‘fast paced’ to build border roads in the states of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, that share their borders with China.”

Still, in the middle of the Doklam crisis, the minister of state for defence, Dr. Subhash Bhamre, while responding to a question in the Parliament, said that “73 Indo-China Border Roads along Northern Borders are approved for construction [back in 2006]. Out of this 27 roads have been completed and balance roads are planned for completion by December 2022.” The BRO, which is responsible for building strategic infrastructure in border areas, has missed several deadlines, raising questions about the BRO’s assurance about the 2022 deadline.

The minister went on to say that the delay in the construction of these projects is “due to delay in forest/wildlife/environment clearance, hard rock stretches, limited working season, delay in land acquisitions, difficulties in availability of construction material, and damage due to natural disasters such as flash flood.” Despite changes in governments, the excuses remain the same.

Reports suggest that incursions on the Sino-Indian may be coming down — there were reportedly about 500 transgressions in 2015, 350 in 2017, and around 200 up to July this year. Still, in addition to infrastructure problems, India also faces other difficulties. For example, a multiplicity of agencies — the Army, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), the Border Security Force (BSF) and the Assam Rifles — managing the border on the Indian side is an issue. This means that both the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and the Ministry of Defence have jurisdiction and India is not particularly known for good coordination between different departments and ministries.

On China’s side of the border, on the other hand, a single unified commander for the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) forces is responsible for the border areas. It must also be noted that China has further strengthened the military command on the border by elevating the rank of the Military Command responsible for the border “by putting it under the jurisdiction of PLA ground forces.”

Though India’s infrastructure development is slow, this has not stopped Chinese media outlets such as Global Times from arguing that New Delhi is being provocative in building border posts and other infrastructure. But New Delhi has little choice but to continue pushing its border infrastructure, though there is little hope that it will very much faster.

This article originally appeared on The Diplomat.

By Frank Clemente*

While Americans were transfixed by Senate hearings over Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assaults, House Republicans quietly passed another enormous tax handout for the wealthiest Americans.

Round one of this giveaway cost $2 trillion. Round two is even bigger — it would explode the deficit by more than $3 trillion. And once again, it’s largely a giveaway to the wealthiest Americans — and could mean devastating service cuts for ordinary people.

President Trump claimed the first tax plan would be “rocket fuel” for the economy, but there’s no evidence it’s done anything to improve the economic wellbeing of working families.

The centerpiece of the first plan was a massive tax cut for corporations. The corporate tax rate was reduced by 40 percent, plus a $400 billion tax break for multinational corporations on their trillions in accumulated offshore profits.

So it’s not surprising corporate profits leaped by over 16 percent in the second quarter of this year compared to the same three months last year — the best showing in six years. Meanwhile corporate tax payments are on schedule to come in $120 billion lower than in 2017.

But corporations aren’t sharing their winnings.

Trump guaranteed working families a $4,000 raise if corporate taxes were cut. Yet average real wages have been stagnant for the past year. Only 4 percent of American workers have gotten any kind of payout related to the corporate tax cuts, and most of those have been one-time bonuses, not permanent raises.

There’s no sign tax cuts have spurred hiring. Job growth under President Trump is merely a continuation of six years of job growth under President Obama — and Obama created more jobs in his last 19 months than Trump has in his first 19 months.

Cutting business taxes was supposed to cause an explosion of investment. Yet business investment has increased at a slower rate this year than at several periods during the Obama recovery.

Instead of investing in workers or equipment, companies are mostly buying back their own stock, a maneuver that artificially inflates the share price and rewards CEOs and wealthy investors. Corporations have announced $733 billion worth of stock buybacks since the Trump-GOP tax law was enacted — 103 times more than the $7 billion workers have gotten in bonuses and raises.

For the money McDonald’s spent on stock buybacks, it could’ve given every one of its 2 million employees that $4,000 raise President Trump promised them. But they didn’t.

The economic miracle envisaged by the tax plan’s backers hasn’t materialized. But the dire consequences predicted by the plan’s opponents certainly have. To cover the deficits created by their own tax cuts, Republicans want to cut trillions of dollars from essential public services.

Despite promising never to touch Medicare or Medicaid, President Trump is seeking $1.3 trillion in cuts to those programs and to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The House GOP wants to cut a total of $5 trillion, including $2 trillion from health care. Trump and House Republicans would also slash funding for students in school and college, among many other service cuts.

Round two of the Trump-GOP tax cuts would only repeat the same destructive pattern: huge handouts to the rich, huge deficits, and huge service cuts for working families. The big difference is that the budget hole created would be much deeper this time, making the resulting cuts to services that much more severe.

No wonder they did it while Americans were distracted.

The sane policy would be to repeal the existing tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and use the money raised to strengthen Medicare, Medicaid, and other essential services the American people rely on.

*Frank Clemente is the executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness. Distributed by OtherWords.org.

Lately the fact-checking world has been in a bit of a crisis. Sites like Politifact and Snopes have traditionally focused on specific claims, which is admirable but tedious – by the time they’ve gotten through verifying or debunking a fact, there’s a good chance it’s already traveled across the globe and back again.

Social media companies have also had mixed results limiting the spread of propaganda and misinformation: Facebook plans to have 20,000 human moderators by the end of the year, and is spending many millions developing its own fake-news-detecting algorithms.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) believe that the best approach is to focus not on the factuality of individual claims, but on the news sources themselves. Using this tack, they’ve demonstrated a new system that uses machine learning to determine if a source is accurate or politically biased.

“If a website has published fake news before, there’s a good chance they’ll do it again,” says postdoctoral associate Ramy Baly, lead author on a new paper about the system. “By automatically scraping data about these sites, the hope is that our system can help figure out which ones are likely to do it in the first place.”

Baly says the system needs only about 150 articles to reliably detect if a news source can be trusted – meaning that an approach like theirs could be used to help stamp out fake-news outlets before the stories spread too widely.

The system is a collaboration between computer scientists at MIT CSAIL and QCRI, which is part of the Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar. Researchers first took data from Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC), a website with human fact-checkers who analyze the accuracy and biases of more than 2,000 news sites, from MSNBC and Fox News to low-traffic content farms.

They then fed that data to a machine learning algorithm called a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, and programmed it to classify news sites the same way as MBFC. When given a new news outlet, the system was then 65 percent accurate at detecting whether it has a high, low or medium level of “factuality,” and roughly 70 percent accurate at detecting if it is left-leaning, right-leaning or moderate.

The team determined that the most reliable ways to detect both fake news and biased reporting were to look at the common linguistic features across the source’s stories, including sentiment, complexity and structure.

For example, fake-news outlets were found to be more likely to use language that is hyperbolic, subjective, and emotional. In terms of bias, left-leaning outlets were more likely to have language that related to concepts of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity, compared to other qualities such as loyalty, authority and sanctity. (These qualities represent the 5 “moral foundations,” a popular theory in social psychology.)

Co-author Preslav Nakov says that the system also found correlations with an outlet’s Wikipedia page, which it assessed for general length – longer is more credible – as well as target words like “extreme” or “conspiracy theory.” It even found correlations with the text structure of a source’s URLs: those that had lots of special characters and complicated subdirectories, for example, were associated with less reliable sources.

“Since it is much easier to obtain ground truth on sources [than on articles], this method is able to provide direct and accurate predictions regarding the type of content distributed by these sources,” says Sibel Adali, a professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who was not involved in the project.

Nakov is quick to caution that the system is still a work-in-progress, and that, even with improvements in accuracy, it would work best in conjunction with traditional fact-checkers.

“If outlets report differently on a particular topic, a site like Politifact could instantly look at our ‘fake news’ scores for those outlets to determine how much validity to give to different perspectives,” says Nakov, a senior scientist at QCRI.

Baly and Nakov co-wrote the new paper with MIT senior research scientist James Glass alongside master’s students Dimitar Alexandrov and Georgi Karadzhov of Sofia University. The team will present the work later this month at the 2018 Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) conference in Brussels, Belgium.

The researchers also created a new open-source dataset of more than 1,000 news sources, annotated with factuality and bias scores – the world’s largest database of its kind. As next steps, the team will be exploring whether the English-trained system can be adapted to other languages, as well as to go beyond the traditional left/right bias to explore region-specific biases (like the Muslim World’s division between religious and secular).

“This direction of research can shed light on what untrustworthy websites look like and the kind of content they tend to share, which would be very useful for both web designers and the wider public,” says Andreas Vlachos, a senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the project.

Nakov says that QCRI also has plans to roll out an app that helps users step out of their political bubbles, responding to specific news items by offering users a collection of articles that span the political spectrum.

“It’s interesting to think about new ways to present the news to people,” says Nakov. “Tools like this could help people give a bit more thought to issues and explore other perspectives that they might not have otherwise considered.”

New findings suggest that diet is a major contributor for the increased risk of hypertension in black compared to white Americans. The results, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, are part of the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study, which looks at the incidence of stroke in approximately 30,000 individuals. The study is funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), a part of the National Institutes of Health.

“This study addresses a lead cause of racial disparity in mortality and identifies potential lifestyle changes that could reduce racial disparities in both stroke and heart disease,” said Claudia Moy, Ph.D., NINDS program director and one of the study authors.

In the study, led by George Howard, Dr.P.H., a biostatistics professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, researchers studied individuals over the age of 45 over a period of 10 years and looked to identify risk factors associated with the higher likelihood of developing high blood pressure in the study participants.

“The majority of disparities we see in the health of black versus white Americans are cardiovascular in nature,” said Dr. Howard, “and of these, all are tied to an increase in high blood pressure.”

For both men and women, a diet composed of high amounts of fried and processed foods and sweetened beverages was the greatest factor associated with why blacks are at a greater risk of developing high blood pressure compared to whites. For both men and women, other important factors included salt intake and education level. For women, additional factors contributing to the racial difference in high blood pressure included obesity and waist size.

“One of the main factors affecting the difference between the black and white population is cardiovascular disease, and the increased risk of high blood pressure among black Americans could help explain why their life expectancy is four years shorter than that of whites,” said Dr. Howard. “Understanding how we can prevent this increased risk of hypertension in blacks is critical for reducing health disparities among the black population.”

The researchers hope that these findings could be applied to reduce the prevalence of hypertension and thus the risk of stroke and heart attack in the black American population. This study suggests that lifestyle changes, particularly changes in diet, could help reduce the disparities seen in black versus white Americans.

“The best way to treat high blood pressure is to prevent it from occurring in the first place,” said Dr. Howard.

The REGARDS study includes more than 30,000 black and white Americans, approximately half of whom live in the Stroke Belt, an area in the southeastern United States where the rate of stroke mortality is higher than the rest of the country. Of these, 6,897 participants, 1,807 black and 5,090 white, were analyzed for this study.

In 2016, the NINDS launched a stroke prevention campaign called Mind Your Risks, which is designed to educate people aged 45-65 about the link between uncontrolled high blood pressure and the risk of having a stroke or developing dementia later in life.