By Faisal Mrza*

Over the past year, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has given a number of interviews with international media to explain the changes happening in the Kingdom. One of the most viewed was an interview last March with the CBS news program, “60 Minutes.” This was his first interview with an American television network.

On Friday, he gave an interview to journalists from Bloomberg News. It came at a critical time for Saudi Arabia. Despite the Kingdom witnessing unprecedented economic movement, it seems that some critics are working to fulfill an agenda attempting to show that Saudi Arabia is failing in the great national economic reforms put forward by Saudi Vision 2030. These critics repeatedly question whether the Kingdom can meet its stated goals. Such attempts are deliberate attacks that aim to sow doubt about Saudi prosperity and the potential of the Kingdom’s young population to thrive.

In the Bloomberg interview, the crown prince emphasized that Saudi Arabia and the US have both maintained a baseline of economic and security cooperation that has kept ties between them strong.

Even during the final years of the Obama administration when relations between the two nations underwent a period of differences, Saudi Arabia and the US were still steadfast allies. Under the Trump administration, relations have warmed and the US continues to fully support Saudi Arabia in its regional role.

The Trump administration has acknowledged that Saudi Arabia is a crucial US strategic partner. Their strong relationship is essential in maintaining stability in the Middle East and economic security worldwide. Such mutual regard bodes well for the Kingdom’s future partnerships with the US and nations worldwide.

Saudi-US business ties remain solid. There are still massive exchanges in trade and value-added services. Now the economic relationship is evolving to focus less on dependency and more on mutual cooperation. In the Bloomberg interview, the crown prince highlighted that under new agreements, Saudi Arabia will purchase armaments from the US, but that part of those armaments will be manufactured in the Kingdom.

The crown prince also clarified that Saudi Arabia, OPEC and its partners have kept their promise to supply oil to the market to make up for any loss of crude from Iran. In fact, while Iran’s exports have been reduced by 700,000 barrels per day, Saudi Arabia, OPEC and non-OPEC nations have stepped in and supplied 1.5 million barrels of oil per day. That is more than double any loss from Iran. He emphasized that slightly higher oil prices are due to issues in Canada, Mexico, Libya and Venezuela. Prince Mohammed mentioned that the Kingdom alone still has spare capacity of 1.3 million barrels per day if required.

The interview covered the topic of negotiations with the Kuwaitis in regards to reactivating oil production in the neutral zone, which Saudi Arabia shares with Kuwait. The crown prince is keen to resume oil output from these fields in an answer to global oil demand for the medium, sour crudes of this type which are facing supply shortages. According to Prince Mohammed, the Saudi government is “trying to convince the Kuwaitis to talk about the sovereignty issues, while continuing to produce.”

In a major piece of economic news, the crown prince cleared up confusion regarding the sale of SABIC shares and the Saudi Aramco IPO in “late 2020, early 2021.” As for criticisms that not all targets had been met, the crown prince commented that the goals had been very high to stimulate people to work hard. If the targets had been partially met, that was better than achieving nothing. If it was necessary to revise plans, so be it. The path forward is not always a straight line and it is a major challenge to move the “morale” of the people. It is certain that spiteful, inaccurate criticism from international media is unhelpful.

Prince Mohammed addressed many controversial subjects and answered Bloomberg journalists’ questions with remedies to kill all rumors and end any misleading stories. Keep in mind that Bloomberg itself was one of the instigators of the controversy about lowering the valuation of Saudi Aramco upon reporting an irrelevant, unfair assessment. The crown prince was clear when he stated that Saudi Aramco is worth at least two trillion dollars.

Speaking of the transparency that Saudi Arabia adopted along with Saudi Vision 2030, the Crown Prince acknowledge that the unemployment rate must be reduced to seven percent by 2030. Without a doubt this illustrates that we’ve passed the stage of denying our own issues and have moved to addressing those issues for an ultimate resolution.

* Faisal Mrza is an energy and oil market adviser. He was formerly with OPEC and Saudi Aramco. Reach him on Twitter: @faisalmrza

By Cornelia Meyer*

Ever since September the oil price has been flirting with new levels: $80 for Brent and $70 for WTI. When OPEC+ (the 15 OPEC nations and their 10 non-OPEC allies, led by Russia) met in Algiers, they decided not to give up on an agreement that saw them curb production by 1.8 million barrels per day (bpd).

This was despite rising oil prices and belligerent tweets by Donald Trump. The JMMC (Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee) merely decided to bring compliance down to 100 percent from the above 120 percent where it stood in mid-September. Saudi Oil Minister Khalid Al-Falih acknowledged that markets were tight, but said that KSA had sufficient spare capacity that could be unleashed if necessary. Al-Falih is also on record saying that, given the choice, he prefers markets to be tight.

It came as no surprise, then, that the $70/$80 levels were pierced permanently. Brent and WTI even overshot the $85 and $75 benchmark for Brent and WTI.

The spike reflected the tightness of the market, which is induced by Venezuela’s low production and the unpredictability of Nigerian and Libyan production because of the internal political situation. The impending Iranian sanctions further spooked the markets. It is unclear by how much Iranian exports will be reduced come Nov. 4, when the sanctions kick in. So far Iranian exports have fallen by roughly one third to about 1.1 million bpd.

On Monday morning India’s Petroleum Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, hinted that India would continue to import crude from Iran after November and settle the transactions in rupees. They hope this will help them to fudge violating the sanctions, which are set to forbid US dollar-denominated trading. This comes as little surprise: India’s refineries are thirsty for heavy crude. India has been one of Venezuela’s big customers, therefore refiners need to substitute for Venezuelan shipments. The country can ill afford to forego a major source of heavy oil.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s offer to substitute Iranian crude with US shale oil does not work, because the latter is light and cannot at this point be accommodated by Indian refiners in huge quantities. Crude does not equal crude.

Some respite will come from Saudi Arabia, which will increase its production to 10.7 million bpd. Russia is now producing 11.3 million bpd, which means it has surpassed its record production levels of October 2016. Last Friday Al-Falih also declared that KSA had an additional 1.3 million bpd of spare capacity that could easily be released if and when required.

These are the ups and downs of daily markets. What we really should look at are the long-term trends. With a growing world population, oil demand is set to grow until about 2040 and plateau after that. The International Energy Agency forecasts demand growth of 1.3 million bpd for 2018 and 1.5 million bpd for 2019 alone. According to the organization the petrochemicals sector will account for 30 percent of growth in oil demand until 2030 and 50 percent from 2030 to 2050. At the same time, the sector is heavily underinvested. During the lean years international oil companies canceled or postponed up to 40 percent of their scheduled investment. They have resumed some of that investment, but not nearly enough to compensate for the fallacies of the lean years. The only oil companies that persisted with their investment patterns irrespective of the level of the oil price are the GCC’s national oil companies such as Saudi Aramco or ADNOC.

Oil is an ultra-long cycle business where a dollar invested today will result in a barrel produced in four to 10 years in the conventional space. The underinvestment will come to haunt the oil markets in the mid-2020s, just when the shale oil production is forecast to peak.

We should keep our eyes on the ball and ensure adequate investment levels in the sector. Given demand and supply projections, the situation will get tighter in the 2020s. Oil companies need to act now to avert the danger of the oil price spiralling out of control, because then oil risks becoming a danger to the global economy.

* Cornelia Meyer is a business consultant, macro-economist and energy expert. Twitter: @MeyerResources

By Sinisa Jakov Marusic

With the required majority for such changes in parliament still in the balance, Macedonia’s government has launched the legal procedure for adoption of the historic ‘name’ agreement with Greece.

At an extraordinary session on Monday, Macedonia’s Social Democrat-led government adopted a motion on making constitutional changes to change the country’s name into the Republic of North Macedonia.

“There are four substantial changes to the [Macedonian Constitution], that the government proposed to parliament,” the government’s spokesperson, Mile Bosnjakovski, told a press conference.

Тhe first change will be the addition of the adjective ‘North’ to the name of the country, as stipulated in the ‘name’ agreement.

The second change envisages changes in the Constitution’s introductory statement that would reaffirm the foundations of Macedonia’s statehood in more detail, Bosnjakovski explained.

The third change stipulates that the country would accent its guarantees for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of its neighbouring countries.

The last change concerns the articles that determine the care of the country for its diaspora.

In the section regarding the diaspora, Bosnjakovski explained that the country will be obligated to take care of the rights “of the Macedonian people and of all the citizens of the country who reside abroad,” without “interfering in the sovereign rights of other countries and their internal affairs, in any forum and for any reason.”

Once parliament receives the government motion, expected on Tuesday, it will schedule a plenary session and a session of its Committee on Constitutional Matters.

Sources from the main ruling Social Democrats told BIRN earlier on Monday that the launch of the procedure was not a signal that the ruling parties had secured the two-thirds majority in parliament that is needed for constitutional changes.

“This is part of our attempt to speed up the legal procedures in case we secure a majority… while the talks [with opposition MPs] are still ongoing” one source said.

“If the motion fails in parliament during the first reading, the parliament will dis-assemble and we will have early elections,” the same source added.

Following the September 30 referendum, which was rendered legally invalid due to the low turnout – despite the high level of support among those voted for the deal – the ruling parties launched talks with their opposition counterparts in a final attempt to persuade them to support the agreement in parliament and avoid early elections.

The governing coalition, led by the Social Democrats and its supporters among smaller parties, has the backing of 71 of the 120 MPs in the chamber.

Prime Minister Zoran Zaev needs the support of at least nine more MPs from the ranks of the opposition bloc, led by the nationalist VMRO DPMNE party.

Parliament’s rulebook gives the MPs a maximum of ten days to discuss the government motion for constitutional changes, after which they will have to vote.

Bosnjakovski refused to speculate on deadlines or the outcome of the vote.

“We will see that very soon when the motion will be submitted to the plenary session and to the vote. For the procedure [for constitutional changes in parliament] to begin, it should be endorsed by a two-thirds majority”, he said.

If MPs approve it, the government can prepare the actual draft constitutional amendments and submit them to a repeat vote.

Amid official silence about the talks on gaining a majority, the ruling parties on Monday mentioned October 15 as the unofficial deadline for parliament to vote.

If the government motion is not approved then, the same sources said the majority would immediately dissolve the parliament and set an early general election.

Prime Minister Zaev initially said this could be held as soon as November 25, as at least 45 days have to pass between the dissolution of the parliament and the polls.

The EU Enlargement Commissioner, Johannes Hahn, on Thursday made it clear that he would prefer a two-thirds majority in parliament for the constitutional changes over early elections in Macedonia.

In a statement to an Austrian newspaper, Johannes Hahn said that implementation of the “name” agreement was “in the country’s interest, not in the interest of parties and politicians. So, how to secure the votes? I believe in the combination of the Balkan and rational approach”.

While talks with opposition MPs and the leadership are ongoing behind closed doors, official statements from both sides suggest they are far from reaching common ground over the elections.

Over the weekend, VMRO DPMNE leader Hristijan Mickoski – whose party insists that the agreement with Greece is harmful – gave two options to the government, either to ditch the agreement with Greece and face the opposition at early elections immediately, or fulfil several other preconditions, such as on the formation of a technical government and the resignation of the Prime Minister at 100 days before the polls.

Mickoski over the weekend also increased the party’s demands and, besides seeking a new Chief Public Prosecutor and a special commission to investigate alleged irregularities during the referendum, also wanted the formation of a new Special Prosecution after the elections, claiming that the existing one has politically persecuted his party.

The ruling party called this a stalling tactic and accused the opposition party of secretly trying to bargain for the amnesty of its former leader, Nikola Gruevski.

The Special Prosecution was formed in 2015 as part of an EU-sponsored crisis agreement between the then ruling VMRO DPMNE party and the then opposition Social Democrats.

It was tasked with investigating allegations of high-level crimes contained in numerous wiretapped telephone recordings revealed by the then opposition SDSM.

Former VMRO DPMNE leader and former prime minister Gruevski and many of his former top associates are now under numerous investigations and trials instigated by the SJO.

NATO Military Chiefs met at the end of September in Warsaw, Poland to discuss future Alliance’ s military strategy.

According to NATO press release, during the meeting, “discussions focused on allied operations, missions and activities, the development of NATO’s military strategy, responsiveness, reinforcement and the NATO Readiness Initiative, as well as the Alliance’s ongoing modernization.”

During the joint press conference with Chief of the Polish General Staff, Lieutenant General Rajmund Andrzejczak, the Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach concluded by stating, that “NATO is the most successful – and the most valuable – Alliance in history.”

Assessing the scope of NATO military events this year, success is measured not so much by the results but by the number of hold events. And the more so, NATO has transformed the approach to its activity from defensive to offensive. NATO leaders even do not hide the nature of military exercises’ scenarios.

Alliance demonstrates that it is not sleeping, it is preparing for war. The theatre of such war is most likely – the Baltic region. This proves the increasing number of military exercises conducted and planned exactly in the Baltic states.

Thus the field training exercise Beowulf in the training area of the Lithuanian armed forces in Pabrade in eastern Lithuania took place at the end of September. It is known that over 600 soldiers from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Czech Republic and Luxembourg as well as 250 vehicles, including tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, armoured personnel carriers, recovery trucks and jeeps are participating in the exercise.

The exercise included combat training, where each unit practiced both attacking and defending. Among other things tactics of combat support like river crossing operations, integration of combat service support elements and in-theatre maintenance was practiced.

At the same time Russia continues to flex its muscles either. These days the Air Bridge 2018 CSTO joint exercise is held on the territory of the Central Military District. Russian-Serbian BARS 2018 flight tactical exercise kicks off in Serbia, Search 2018 tactical special exercise kicks off in Kazakhstan. And so on…

Series of exercises prove Russia will not allow NATO to surpass in military sector. In other words situation develops spirally and leads to confrontation. The Baltic states chose to be NATO’s tool in such confrontation. And if Russia can forgive former Soviet republics for preparing to defend themselves, quite evidently, Russia will not accept their preparation to attack.

*Viktors Domburs is an engineer, born in Latvia, and now lives in the United Kingdom.

Malaysian schools are at risk. Is it now governed by the ideology of ‘rempitism’? What is this ideology? How do we prevent it from destroying the country? What are our educational leaders doing about it? I proposed some remedies based on the relationship between education, economy, and technopoly, but this ideology is of pressing concern.

The Malaysian phenomenon of youths racing illegally on public roads on customised motorbikes after midnight to that rob peaceful citizens of their restful sleep is a phenomenon akin to a capitalist economy of a struggling showcasing Third Word nation, that hypermodernises beyond the ability of its people to cope with its sensationalised designs of ‘economic miracles’.

Both phenomena rest upon idiotic pride and arrogance that endanger a peaceful, ethical and sustainable future. Both present clear and present danger on the equally dangerous highway of globalisation.

A ‘rempitised’ economic and education system ‘rams’ human beings into different ‘pits’ of the conveyer belt of the capitalist production system; creating what looks like a natural progression of meritocracy in education and social evolution. The foundation of this system is neocolonialism, structural violence and the alienation of labour (like participants in the global rat race, mat rempit always want to finish first in the deadly race and be the first to do a wheelie for the world to see).

Is our public education system failing? Is it producing more and more mat rempit, anak Abu, bohsia, bohjan, and alienated youth put at risk by our education system?

Are we creating class systems in education the way we have created varying types of classrooms that correspond to different classes in society? Why are we seeing the tuition industry becoming a billion-ringgit business, helping our children memorising more and more but understanding less and less of what they learn?

Do we have people in the education ministry well-versed enough in analysing the phenomenon of our rempitised economy (speeding it up illegally) and how this is directly related to how we are ‘schooling’ our society?

What is our national agenda in education, not only to ensure no child of any race or religion be left behind but seeing through that they will love learning as a lifelong pursuit? How much planning, scenario-building, analysing, big data-gathering, futuristics-thinking, and innovative strategizing is the Education Ministry doing to address this issue of alienation in schools?

Do we now have an entire system of higher education inheriting the children of our rempitised economy and contributing to the low quality of graduates – who cannot think critically and are always subjected to the whims and fancies of a totalitarian regime only interested in tightening the stranglehold on our universities?

British and American scholars like Paul Willis, Henry Levin, Peter McLaren and Martin Carnoy who studied the phenomena of schooling in capitalist societies observed the nature of the learning process in countries in which the rapid and unreflective industrialisation and post-industrialisation process have created one-dimensional citizens out of youth.

Schooling teaches these children to become good and obedient workers in an economic system that reduces the larger population into labour, while enriching the upper class into people and property-owners in a rempitised economy.

‘What’s lacking in teachers’

Is our education ministry training teachers well in urban education and in the schooling of our at-risk youth? Will it study enough of the issue of class and social reproduction in order to shift the way we think about student success, learning engagement, and closing the achievement gap between the rich and the poor?

Do we actually know the root cause of rempitism and gangsterism in schools, and are we able to design better learning systems for those who are already marginalised and left behind by our rempitised economy? How many schools are today classified as troubled, especially in the infiltration of drugs and drug traffickers in schools?

I have a sense that the cases of gangsterism and bullying of teachers will continue to increase. More private schools will be built and Malaysians will lose confidence in their public schools. More private schools mean more divisions in society. The rich will produce better schools and the poor will be left behind in this rempitised system we have all created in the name of newer versions of the New Economic Policy.

Teachers do not have the necessary concepts and skills to deal not only with millennial children (high-tech, high gadgetry, low attention span, low school-tolerance), but also the rempitised children who have low skills of reading, writing and computing.

Children left behind will be those who become mat and minah rempit and even those alienated at a very young age, in estates and city slums. They will be destructive to the classroom process and will translate their social anger into counter-productive and destructive activities.

These are the ones who will be made criminals as a result of an uncaring education system that criminalises the human mind by placing unmotivated, uncreative and unprepared teachers to develop the untapped geniuses in our classrooms.

Criminals are made, not born. Each child is a gift. It’s how we design the system of equitability, peace, and justice in schooling that will determine the nature of ‘social conveyer belt’ we are using.

Should we rename the mat and minah rempit as mat cemerlang (excellent ones) as suggested by an Umno Youth leader some time ago? Should we build a racing circuit for them to continue drag racing in places such as Johor Bahru and Kuala Terengganu?

I do not think we should. I think those who propose such names and measures of glorification need radical counselling on the meaning of education. I think it shows a clear lack of understanding of the root of the problem. Wrong diagnosis of a social ill.

Rehabilitation programme

I think we should beef up the highway police force and stop illegal drag racing, round up the mat rempit and send them for six-month rehabilitation in rempit camps near Perlis, guarded by graduates of the once glorified National Service.

We should build a safe motorcross clearing/ zones and let them drag-race happily in these areas until they are exhausted.

In between these sessions, we ought to give them a good and safe motorcycle education so that they will understand what it means to ride safely and not endanger the life of others.

We can have the National Civics Bureau write the module so that good indoctrination programmes will be used more on these rempitised youth instead of those who do not need to be indoctrinated into any form of totalitarianism.

Peace-loving, rest-needing, night-sleeping citizens affected by the activities of rempitism will appreciate this radical programme of reconfiguring the mind of the rempitised youth.

‘De-rempitising our schools’

In the meantime, how do we deal with the leadership of the public education system? We need to start by selecting only those who are well-versed in the entire spectrum of education.

We have ministers, educational experts, specialists and educational representatives who either have minimal classroom experience or none at all – let alone have much-needed knowledge in the history, theory, post-structurality and possibilities of education.

We place them in this ministry based on political considerations. They mess things up and show their inability to understand where our youth are heading, or how to design an education system good enough to reflect the dream we have – a dream of a just, equitable, environmentally sustainable, intellectual and ethical society. Regardless of race and ethnicity.

We need the English language, the lingua franca, as the main medium of instruction if we are to succeed in the globalising world.

We are more concerned with having our students and teachers pledge blind loyalty to the signs and symbols of power; one-dimensional thinking; and politically correct behaviour instead of developing, celebrating and further grooming good teachers who can radicalise the minds of the youth of tomorrow.

We force our university students to ceremoniously recite loyalty pledges, and round on those who protest against corruption and social injustice. We have failed to teach them citizenship skills and show them what a good political culture which honours the separation of powers and put the constitution as the most supreme law of the land looks like.

We train the mind to be absurdly obedient, against the backdrop of our speeded-up, hypermodernised economy – one we rempitised in the name of any rebranded New Economic Policy.

The question for us now is: how do we de-rempitise our society?

What kind of educational leadership do we need to address this issue?

By Karl Romano and Luis Liwanag

Southeast Asian navies will hold maritime drills with their Chinese counterparts in China later this month, the Philippines said Monday, in their first joint naval exercises amid a festering South China Sea territorial dispute.

The drills are to take place from Oct. 22 through 29 in the Chinese city of Zhanjiang, about 2,109 km (1,318 miles) south of Beijing, defense department spokesman Arsenio Andolong told reporters.

“The proposal for a joint ASEAN and Chinese exercise was submitted in February of this year,” during a regional defense meeting in Singapore, Andolong said.

He said Philippines’ top naval official, Vice Admiral Robert Empedrad, is likely to join, but the navy has yet to ascertain which of its two latest warships, retrofitted vessels obtained from the United States, would be used.

In August, China and the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) staged their first computer-simulated drills in Singapore. It involved cooperation scenarios in search-and-rescue operations during a mock ship collision at sea.

To avoid controversy, both sides agreed that the upcoming drills take place far away from the South China Sea, the focus of long-seething territorial disputes between four ASEAN members and Beijing, which has transformed seven disputed reefs into man-made islands that now simulate military bases with surface-to-air missiles and runways.

During the annual meeting of ASEAN foreign ministers in Singapore two months ago, an agreement was announced on a first draft of a “code of conduct,” a set of rules aimed at reducing chances of accidental clashes in the disputed sea region, a strategic waterway through which more than $3 billion of ship-borne trade goes through each year.

China and Taiwan have overlapping claims with ASEAN members Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam and the Philippines, some of which have sparred in recent years with Beijing.

ASEAN diplomats considered the code of conduct as a “milestone” even as they said that negotiations were continuing for a final draft of the document that is seen as a development that would de-escalate tensions in the area.

Western nations and other ASEAN members Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, Singapore and Thailand have called for disputes to be resolved peacefully, but China has accused Washington of meddling into an Asian dispute.

The U.S. military has recently been conducting fly overs and freedom-of-navigation tours in the disputed region, and have reported receiving warnings from the Chinese side when its fighter gets and warships came close to China’s artificial islands.

China poses no threat, Manila says

The Philippines has said it was monitoring developments in the region, but said that China posed no threat to its smaller neighbors, as long as Beijing is not directly challenged.

There have been recent reports that Beijing has landed nuclear-capable jets on an island that it occupies, despite earlier agreeing not to militarize the islands it claims.

Manila’s foreign office has said it has filed several diplomatic actions against China, although it has not publicized them.

President Rodrigo Duterte’s government has been working behind the scenes, and has appeared to have gained advantage by its appeasement diplomacy than by directly confronting Beijing.

Since becoming president in 2016, Duterte has made it a point to tighten relations with Beijing, which has been angered by a ruling of an international arbitration court favoring the Philippines.

The previous administration of Benigno Aquino had taken China to court after its ships encroached in the Scarborough Shoal, which lies in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. After three years, the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled in favor of Manila in July 2016, when Duterte was already the president.

China, however, refused to comply with the court’s decision and continued with its island-building activities in the region.

(RFE/RL) — A new survey shows the number of Russians who regard President Vladimir Putin as Russia’s most trusted politician has fallen significantly over the past year.

The survey released on October 8 was conducted between September 20-26 by the independent pollster Levada Center and asked respondents to list five or six politicians whom they trusted the most.

Putin was first with 39 percent, and was followed by ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who each enjoyed the trust of 15 percent of Russians. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was fourth, with 10 percent.

The survey found that trust in Putin had fallen nine percentage points since June and a total of 20 percentage points since November.

A separate question found that the least trusted politician was Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, while Zhirinovsky was second with 20 percent, and Putin third with 13 percent.

Putin last week signed into law an extremely unpopular bill that will gradually increase the state retirement age to 60 for women and 65 for men.

Most ordinary Russians are deeply opposed to the reforms, which sparked rare street protests across the country.

Putin, who has been either president or prime minister since 2000, won the March presidential election with more than 76 percent of the vote.

Putin’s lowest-ever rating in a Levada poll came in August 2013, when 30 percent of respondents said he was a trusted politician.

His popularity surged to more than 80 percent in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine.

It is surprising that when India took steps to deport seven Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar with full cooperation from the Myanmar government to take back the refugees, UN human rights officials criticized the move and almost condemned India’s action. On the other hand, one would expect that UN should applaud India’s decision and view India’s move to deport the refugees back to Myanmar and Myanmar government agreeing to receive them as a positive and constructive move. Such approach could be a trend setter and pave way for the return of around 1.2 million Rohingya refugees who are now staying in 30 camps spread over 6000 acres in Bangladesh, with no idea as to what the future would hold for them.

Millions of refugees around the world have rushed to other countries and are staying permanently there causing social and economic problems for the regions. Rarely have the world seen instances of refugees returning back to their motherland.

When thousands of Rohingyas left Myanmar and reached Bangladesh, UN strongly condemned the Myanmar government and it’s military for the situation. Earlier, the Rohingya militants were causing huge violence in Myanmar and attacked several police stations and government establishments, which inevitably forced the Myanmar government to act to put down the rebels. UN did nothing and said nothing when the Rohingya militants created unrest in Myanmar and simply watched the situation from the gallery.

In all such cases, where refugees seek asylum in other countries , UN simply sympathised with the refugees and has nothing to say about the conflict that happened which resulted in refugees rushing out.

In most incidents of refugee exodus in the past, it could be seen that militants and separatists who call themselves as liberators and freedom fighters have waged war against the establishments, when the governments have to necessarily fight back to protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the region. In the process, innocent people suffer and seek asylum elsewhere to protect themselves. While UN is able to do nothing to resolve such conflicts, it simply reacts by sympathizing with the refugees and blaming the governments for the refugee exodus.

The classic recent example is Sri Lanka where the UN has been unduly critical against the Sri Lankan government for it’s acts when it had to necessarily take steps to put down the rebels who wanted to split Sri Lanka and form a separate country. It was a case of civil war in Sri Lanka between the separatists / militants and the government and both the parties used strong arm methods and both the parties indulged in human rights violation. UN is selectively critical of Sri Lankan government which had to fight to safeguard the territorial integrity of the country and has nothing to say about the violent acts of the militants.

With 1.2 million refugees presently on the soil of Bangladesh, many wonder as to whether these Rohingya refugees would go back to Myanmar at all. If they would not do so, it would continue to be an unbearable burden on Bangladesh and situation would become further worse , as the refugee population in Bangladesh would further swell due to more births. With being fed and without any work or skill, the Myanmar refugees would become a huge population that could contribute to instability and social tension in Bangladesh.

Myanmar government has agreed to take back Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh and UN should facilitate this by coordinating between Myanmar and Bangladesh government in a proactive and positive manner.

While Bangladesh is facing huge crisis now due to influx of around 1.2 million refugees, the officials and office bearers of UN are sitting at safe distance and are making critical observations about India’s move to deport rohingya refugees with full cooperation of the Myanmar government. This clearly give an impression that UN is turning out to be an armchair critic.

When India has successfully taken steps to deport the seven Rohingya refugees, this move should be considered as a model for facilitating the return of Rohingya refugees to Myanmar from Bangladesh. Good lessons have to be learnt from this move of India and based on this experience, the strategy to repatriate the refugees could be fine tuned.

Instead of viewing the whole exercise in a positive and proactive manner, the criticism of UN human rights officials against India’s move is acting as a damper and counter productive rhetoric.

In such scenario, one cannot but wonder whether UN has any credible and fair human rights policy at all and does it have any clarity on such issues.

By Michael Lelyveld

As China’s economy weakens under tariff pressure, the government may be in danger of breaking one of the Communist Party’s most important pledges to guarantee growth.

Most analysts believe that the damage to China’s economic growth rate from current U.S. tariffs will be limited to only a fraction of 1 percentage point of gross domestic product.

In late August, Bloomberg News estimated that the trade war would lower China’s GDP by 0.2 of a percentage point this year and 0.3 of a percentage point in 2019, citing a median of forecasts from 16 analysts.

The numbers suggest that the trade war would hasten the ongoing deceleration of China’s growth rate, which has already slipped from 6.9 percent in 2017 to 6.7 percent in this year’s second quarter before tariffs took effect, according to official figures.

Experts believe that the economic impact is likely to be moderately negative and manageable, but political consequences could be more severe.

A separate Bloomberg poll of economists estimated that next year’s growth will decline from 6.6 percent this year to 6.3 percent in 2019.

At the low end of the range, China’s government could be at risk of failing to meet its longstanding 2020 growth goal.

“While that’s still much faster than other major economies, slower growth will imperil the nation’s aim of doubling the size of the economy in the 10 years to 2020,” Bloomberg said in August, taking the latest $200-billion (1.3-trillion yuan) tranche of U.S. tariffs into account.

The weakening trend would drag growth down into the range of 6.2 percent, which economists have calculated as the minimum needed to fulfil the Chinese Communist Party’s historic promise to double GDP in the decade since 2010.

Hu Jintao’s goal

In 2012, former President Hu Jintao set the goal of doubling both GDP and per capita income by 2020, delivering the development benefits of the party’s policies.

At the time, Hu’s promise was estimated to imply average annual economic growth rates of about 7 percent.

By maintaining relatively high official growth rates in the intervening years, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) was thought to be giving the government enough slack to implement tougher reforms while keeping its eye on the 2020 calculation.

Over the past two years, the government has assured itself of room to maneuver by setting loose annual growth targets of “around 6.5 percent,” which were easily achieved.

But that was before the surprise pressures from international “headwinds” and the tariff challenge.

Now, the country’s GDP may be in danger of falling below both the 6.5- percent level and the 2020 goal.

Some recent forecasts see China’s growth as dropping below the 6.2-percent level. Last month, Fitch Ratings estimated that the 2019 rate would decline to 6.1 percent.

On Sunday, the government showed concern over the pace of the slippage as the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) lowered its reserve requirement ratio (RRR) for banks by one percentage point, marking the fourth cut this year.

The reduction would have the effect of releasing 1.2 trillion yuan (U.S. $174.7 billion) into the market, although 450 billion yuan (U.S. $65.5 billion) would be used to pay back previous bank loans, the PBOC said.

The move came on the same day as a further sign of worry as the PBOC said its foreign exchange reserves edged down for the second month in a row to U.S. $3.087 trillion, flirting with the psychologically troublesome U.S. $3-trillion mark.

The pressures appear to be piling up on the 2020 promise.

‘Potentially serious issue’

As a result of frequent repetition, officials have turned it into a critical measure of both China’s and the Communist Party’s success.

Falling short could test the legitimacy of the party’s policies and the leadership of President Xi Jinping, who has assumed nearly unlimited levels of control.

David Bachman, a China scholar and professor of international studies at University of Washington in Seattle, said that Xi and Premier Li Keqiang may be able to blame U.S. President Donald Trump and his unforeseen policies if the 2020 goals are not met.

“I think that psychologically for the party and the leadership, that pledge to double is still quite important to them, but …  it will be something you can excuse away without a lot of blowback, at least from society,” Bachman said.

The political fallout may not end with the public’s reaction, however.

“Within the party, where people might have a desire to go after Xi Jinping and perhaps Li Keqiang, there’s where I think it could be a more potentially serious sort of issue,” said Bachman.

Critics may use the occasion of a broken economic promise to argue that Xi’s push for great power status had brought China into conflict with an unpredictable President Trump.

“I could see this politically playing out as a plank in an opposition program to Xi Jinping,” Bachman said.

Because Xi has monopolized power, he will find it hard to escape blame for the tariff war and the failed pledge to double GDP, he said.

“He is responsible for it because he’s taken on responsibility for everything,” Bachman said.

Lowell Dittmer, a China expert and political science professor at University of California, Berkeley, agrees that Xi will be on the hook for China’s economic performance, even though he inherited the 2020 goal from Hu Jintao.

“He can hardly avoid that,” Dittmer said. “He’s taken the helm. He wanted it and he’s got it.”

Dittmer said he has been surprised by the level of resistance to Xi’s power grab among Chinese intellectuals, who previously embraced the less restrictive “opening up” policies of the late leader Deng Xiaoping.

“In a lot of respects, Xi has gone against Deng’s model for economic growth with more centralization, the end of term limits, and the emphasis of the party above all. That wasn’t Deng,” Dittmer said.

The largely private misgivings about Xi’s cult of personality suggests there could be conflict between his political power and the power of Hu’s 2020 promise. Dittmer noted that many officials were ousted following the last economic downturn and the stock market slump in 2015.

What will be the remedy?

If the tariffs continue and the economy risks failing the 2020 test, it is unclear what the government’s remedy will be.

The government has been pursuing its deleveraging campaign for the past year to control China’s debt, but the effort may be set aside if growth continues to slow, Dittmer said. The alternative of pumping up growth with a new wave of stimulus spending may pose unacceptable risks.

Another solution to the 2020 problem may be to pump up the official figures.

“If they have to, they’ll fudge the statistics,” Bachman said.

But the NBS has already been struggling with data credibility problems for over a decade and would face an outcry from international economists if it grossly overstates the GDP numbers, as it was suspected of doing in 2015.

Most recently, the NBS pledged a “continued hardline stance” and “zero tolerance” for data inflation and falsification at the local level.

On Sept. 18, the agency publicized a series of local data fraud cases as part of a “name and shame” campaign to discourage the practice.

NBS inspectors found “official interference” with economic reports from Tongliao city in eastern Inner Mongolia, citing false data in 20 major industrial enterprises, 11 retailers and three service companies, the official Xinhua news agency said.

China is said to be putting “more emphasis on the authenticity of data amid lingering economic headwinds.”

“Progress has been made and basic statistics are generally real and reliable, the NBS said, while acknowledging data falsification still exists in some places,” according to the Xinhua report.

The textbook story of what happens if the government runs a budget deficit when the economy is near its potential is that interest rates rise. Higher interest rates then reduce demand in interest sensitive sectors like residential construction, investment, and car purchases.

Higher rates also lead to a higher valued dollar. This makes U.S. goods and services less competitive internationally, which means a larger trade deficit. That also reduces demand. The result is that much or all of the demand created by the deficit is offset by the reduction in demand from this crowding out effect.

Of course the textbooks often underemphasize the intervening step. The Federal Reserve Board could act to prevent this sort of crowding out by committing to keep interest rates low. The risk of doing this is that if the economy is really near its potential, then the excess demand will quickly lead to higher inflation.

It would have been desirable in my view if the Fed had taken this risk and kept interest rates at lower levels, to see how low we could get the unemployment rate. This is especially important since the additional employment would disproportionately benefit the most disadvantaged workers, African Americans, Hispanics, people with less education, and people with a criminal record.

However, the Fed went the other way. It continued and likely accelerated its path of interest rate hikes. As a result, we have seen a sharp increase in long-term interest rates, with the 10-year Treasury bond rate rising from less than 2.2 percent a year ago to more than 3.0 percent in the most recent data.

This has had the expected results. Existing home sales peaked last November at a 5.72 million annual rate. The annual rate has since fallen by almost 400,000. (There is typically a one to two month lag between when a contract is signed and the sale, which means the peak in contracts occurred likely occurred in September, before rates began to rise.) Pending home sales show a similar pattern, with the levels reported for August down by more than 5.0 percent from last fall’s peaks. Residential construction reflects the slower pattern in sales, with housing starts down by more than 7.0 percent from the peaks last fall.

In addition to being a big factor in slowing sales, higher interest rates also reduce mortgage refinancing. In the most recent week’s data, refinancing was down more than 30 percent from year ago levels. This matters for two reasons. First, refinancing itself employs a large number of people. While it is unfortunate that people have to pay all sorts of fees when they get a mortgage, these fees do create jobs.

The other reason the falloff in refinancing matters is that homeowners typically are able to free up money when they can refinance at a lower interest rate. They typically spend at least some of this money. If people are unable to refinance since mortgage rates are too high, we will not see this boost to their income and spending.

The impact of higher interest rates on non-residential investment has always been hugely exaggerated. As it stands investment is somewhat higher than its year ago level. This means whatever negative impact higher interest rates may have had, other factors have been more than offsetting.

On the other hand, higher interest rates are having pretty much the textbook effect on the value of the dollar. The Fed’s broad index, which measures the value of the dollar against a basket of currencies of our trading partners, shows the dollar is up by around 5.0 percent from its year ago level. This rise in the dollar, coupled with a modest pickup in growth, has had the predicted effect on the trade deficit.

In the first seven months of the year the trade deficit in 2018 has been $337.9 billion. This is an increase of more than $22 billion from the deficit of $315.9 billion over the first seven months of 2017 (around 0.1 percent of GDP). The rise in the trade deficit is $4.3 billion more if we pull out petroluem products.

The preliminary data for August shows the gap is getting larger, with the deficit in goods more than $11 billion larger than the deficit for August of 2017.  This is important because it takes time for the economy to fully adjust to changes in currency values. To date, we have likely only seen a portion of the increase in the trade deficit attributable to the rise in the value of the dollar following the passage of the tax cut. If there is no reversal in the dollar’s rise, we are likely to see the deficit expand still further in the rest of 2018 and 2019.

Taking this all together, let’s say that the tax cut, coupled with the modest increases in government spending would have boosted demand by roughly one percent of GDP in the absence of any crowding out effect. The drop in residential construction is likely offsetting roughly one-fifth of this increase (0.2 to 0.25 percent of GDP). The rise in the trade deficit, may offset one half or more of the increase in demand (many other factors do come into play here). And the lower consumption assoicated with higher mortgage interest payments may eventually knock off another 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points of GDP.

Taken together, we may see pretty much all of the increase in demand from the tax cut and spending increased offset by various channels of crowding out. We could say the net is zero, but it is important to remember that the tax cut went mostly to the rich. So they are spending somewhat more than would otherwise be the case. On the other hand many moderate and middle income people may be unable to afford a home because of higher mortgage interest rates. Alternatively, because they have to pay more in mortgage interest, they have less money to spend on other things. So we will have redistributed consumption from low and middle income households to those at the top.

Of course we do have to remember that this story depends importantly on the Fed’s decision to raise rates. If the Fed instead committed to leave rates low until there was clear evidence of accelerating inflation then we may have not seen anywhere near as much crowding out. That still would not mean that giving a tax cut targeted to the rich was a good idea, but the rest of the country need not suffer as directly from the policy.

This originally appeared on Dean Baker’s blog.

Orson Welles’ spectral return to the screen, ingeniously in posthumous mode, should have come as a comfort to the magicians skilled in the arts of trickery. Beyond the grave, he seems to be exerting a continuing influence, with his film, The Other Side of the Wind making its debut after 48 torrid years at the Telluride Film Festival. His delight for illusion and the magical manipulations of the camera would not have been out of place in the anxiety filled age mistakenly called the “post-truth” era.

Starting momentously grand and at summit greatness in Citizen Kane, and heading low into financial difficulty and stuttering projects, his genius was as prodigious as his luck was absent. His aptitude in mastering the brutish nature of the directing set was unquestioned – except in Hollywood. Throughout he was plagued by the curse that money has over the genius of expression. Power and control do not necessarily entail backing and profits – for Welles, it was the sheer sense of doing something, the need to run multiple projects that might never have seen the light of day. His mind, and application, proved inscrutably errant.

What Welles did master, to an extent, was the degree of fakery, creating a world of illusion that refuses to date. The word “fake” has a certain pejorative quality, having been further stained by its users in the age of Donald J. Trump, often in connection with that other unreliable companion, “news”. But Welles managed to give it a boost of respectable guile, a teasing sense of about how other realities might be seen. Now, to challenge such ways of seeing by claiming them to be fake would either make you a mental patient or a US president. For Welles, it was a cinematic experiment or a broadcasting contrivance, an effort to alter the senses and entertain.

Welles could hardly have been despondent about this age, he being the finest exponent of the values of fakery. He would have gotten down to work, tyrannically engaged with his staff in producing a fine work on the odiously named “post-truth world” (since when was there a fully truthful world in any case, one pulsating with verity?).

His most delightful ribbings would have now been subsumed under such tags as misinformation, crowned by the meaningless nature of fake news. Could he have gotten away with the radio announcement made on October 30, 1938 that extra-terrestrials had, in fact, landed on earth and attacked it with single minded fury? Any empanelled jury would have to ponder.

The occasion is worth retelling. Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, and the Mercury Theatre group, featured, along with an updated version of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. National radio supplied the thrilling medium and the delivery. “The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the air in the ‘War of the Worlds’ by H.G. Wells.” A mild mannered, sensible start.

Then came the Welles’ introduction, followed by a weather report. The announcer duly took listeners to “the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra.” Cue the music, then a report that “Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Ill” had noted “explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars.” Re-cue the music, then an interruption that a meteor had found its way into a farmer’s field in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey.

The Martians had purportedly arrived. Observers were on hand. Emerging from a metallic cylinder was a creature “wriggling out of the shadow like a grey snake. Now here’s another one and another one and another one.” There were unsettling notes of “wet leather”; the faces were “indescribable”. “The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent.” Then the shooting commenced: “heat-ray” weapons trained on the humans at the site. Some 7,000 National Guardsmen were vaporised. The US military were deployed. Poisonous gas followed in retaliation.

The hoax had seemingly had its dastardly effect, though the extent of it remains disputed. Tim Crook, in his discussion on the psychological potency of radio, suggested that the newspapers had embellished the account, largely on account of the threat posed to their estate by the emergence of radio. “It does not appear that anyone died as a result, but listeners were treated for shock, hysteria and heart attacks.” Welles came to a similar conclusion: paper headlines reporting lawsuits running into $12 million were a consequence of envy occasioned by threat posed by radio advertising.

One myth speaks of thousands of New Yorkers speeding from their homes in deluded panic, their minds impregnated by the prospective deeds of extra-terrestrial terror. Ben Gross of the New York Daily News recalled in his memoir a scene of New York’s streets: there was a state of near total desertion that October in 1938.

The Federal Communications Commission, trapped between the remit of enforcing regulations ensuring proper use of the airways for such things as “promoting safety of life and property” yet also fostering “artistic, informational and cultural needs” conducted an investigation into the affair. It found the laws of the United States unbroken, regulations intact. This was a fine thing, given the famous assertion by US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in Schenck v United States (1919) that, “The most stringent protection of free speech should not protect a man in falsely shouting ‘fire’ in a theatre and causing panic.”

The wily Welles, ever the tease, escaped ruination and duly went on to make Citizen Kane. “We can only suppose,” he reflected on being informed that the FCC would investigate the episode, “that the special nature of radio, which is often heard in fragments, or in parts disconnected from the whole, had led to this misunderstanding.” And in this, we have the precursor to mass information and disconnection; between selected parts and the baffling whole; the Internet and social media dissemination; Trump tweeting at midnight and digital trolls roaming around the clock; the misinformation merchants and the mercenaries of trickery.

At the release of The Other Side of the Wind, Peter Bogdanovich struck a melancholic note on the Palm Theatre stage. “It’s sad because Orson’s not here to see it.” But then came a rueful qualifier. “Or maybe he is.”

Global average sea-level could rise by nearly 8 feet by 2100 and 50 feet by 2300 if greenhouse gas emissions remain high and humanity proves unlucky, according to a review of sea-level change and projections by Rutgers and other scientists.

Since the start of the century, global average sea-level has risen by about 0.2 feet. Under moderate emissions, central estimates of global average sea-level from different analyses range from 1.4 to 2.8 more feet by 2100, 2.8 to 5.4 more feet by 2150 and 6 to 14 feet by 2300, according to the study, published in Annual Review of Environment and Resources.

And with 11 percent of the world’s 7.6 billion people living in areas less than 33 feet above sea level, rising seas pose a major risk to coastal populations, economies, infrastructure and ecosystems around the world, the study says.

Sea-level rise varies over location and time, and scientists have developed a range of methods to reconstruct past changes and project future ones. But despite the differing approaches, a clear story is emerging regarding the coming decades: From 2000 to 2050, global average sea-level will most likely rise about 6 to 10 inches, but is extremely unlikely to rise by more than 18 inches. Beyond 2050, projections are more sensitive to changes in greenhouse gas emissions and to the approaches for projecting sea-level change.

“There’s much that’s known about past and future sea-level change, and much that is uncertain. But uncertainty isn’t a reason to ignore the challenge,” said study co-author Robert E. Kopp, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and director of Rutgers’ Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. “Carefully characterizing what’s known and what’s uncertain is crucial to managing the risks sea-level rise poses to coasts around the world.”

Scientists used case studies from Atlantic City, New Jersey, and from Singapore to discuss how current methods for reconstructing past sea-level change can constrain future global and local projections. They also discussed approaches for using scientific sea-level projections and how accurate projections can lead to new sea-level research questions.

A large portion of sea-level rise in the 20th century, including most of the global rise since 1975, is tied to human-caused global warming, the study says.

About a quarter of the world’s seafood caught in the ocean comes from bottom trawling, a method that involves dragging a net along the ocean’s shelves and slopes to scoop up shrimp, cod, rockfish, sole and other kinds of bottom-dwelling fish and shellfish. The technique impacts these seafloor ecosystems, because other marine life and habitats can be killed or disturbed unintentionally as nets sweep across the seafloor.

Scientists agree that extensive bottom trawling can negatively affect marine ecosystems, but the central question — how much of the seafloor is trawled, or the so-called footprint of trawling — has been hard to nail down.

A new analysis that uses high-resolution data for 24 ocean regions in Africa, Europe, North and South America and Australasia shows that 14 percent of the overall seafloor shallower than 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) is trawled. Most trawl fishing happens in this depth range along continental shelves and slopes in the world’s oceans. The study focused on this depth range, covering an area of about 7.8 million square kilometers of ocean.

The paper, appearing October 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, brought together 57 scientists based in 22 countries, with expertise in mapping fishing activity from satellite monitoring and fishing logbook data. It shows that the footprint of bottom-trawl fishing on continental shelves and slopes across the world’s oceans often has been substantially overestimated.

“Trawling has been a very controversial activity, and its footprint has not been quantified for so many regions at a sufficiently high resolution,” said lead author Ricardo Amoroso, who completed the research as a University of Washington postdoctoral researcher in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “When you don’t quantify the impacts of trawling at a fine scale, you end up with an overestimation of the trawling footprint.”

Previous analyses have mapped trawling on 1,000 or more square-kilometer grids, for example, compared with the 1- to 3-square-kilometer grids used in this analysis.

Footprint estimates presented in this new paper also are more accurate than those described in some previous studies because they use information about the gear used by fishing fleets, the authors explained. Knowing whether a trawling net spans 10 meters or 100 meters, for example, helps to improve the estimate of the seafloor area impacted.

While the authors found that 14 percent of the regions included in the study were trawled, there were major regional differences. For example, only 0.4 percent of the seafloor off South Chile is trawled, while more than 80 percent of the seafloor in the Adriatic Sea, a part of the Mediterranean Sea found to have the most intense footprint, is trawled.

Additionally, trawling footprints covered less than 10 percent of the seafloor area in Australian and New Zealand waters, and in the north Pacific’s Aleutian Islands, East Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, but exceeded 50 percent in some European seas.

The study also provided evidence for related environmental benefits. In regions where fishing rates for commercially fished trawl-caught stocks met accepted sustainability benchmarks, trawl footprints were usually smaller, explained co-author Simon Jennings of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea.

“For those regions where bottom-trawling footprints were less than 10 percent of the seafloor area, fishing rates on bottom-dwelling fish stocks almost always met international sustainability benchmarks. But when footprints exceed 20 percent, they rarely met them,” Jennings said.

The authors acknowledge that some regions known to have a lot of trawling activity were not included in this study because data providing a detailed picture of fishing activity were not available. Southeast Asia is one of those regions.

Still, this new paper offers the most comprehensive look yet at trawling activity worldwide, explained co-author Ray Hilborn, a UW professor of aquatic and fishery sciences. It also describes a way to estimate footprints from trawling in regions where gear dimensions, vessel speeds and total hours trawled are known, but that lack the vessel-specific location data now collected by some fleets.

“We are able to use this method to make reasonably good estimates of the impact of trawling in places where we don’t have fine-scale spatial data,” Hilborn said.

Other researchers involved with designing the study are Michel Kaiser of Bangor University in the United Kingdom and the Marine Stewardship Council; Roland Pitcher of CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere in Australia; Adriaan Rijnsdorp of Wageningen Marine Research in the Netherlands; Robert McConnaughey of NOAA Fisheries, Alaska Fisheries Science Center; Ana Parma of Centro Nacional Patagónico in Argentina; Petri Suuronen of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the Natural Resources Institute Finland; Jeremy Collie of the University of Rhode Island; and Jan Hiddink of Bangor University. A full list of the co-authors is available in the paper.

This group is also evaluating the impact of trawling on plants and animals that live on the seafloor, and how changes experienced by these plants and animals affect key fish species.

Carbon losses caused by El Niño forest fires of 2015 and 2016 could be up to four times greater than thought, according to a study of 6.5 million hectares of forest in Brazilian Amazonia.

New research, published in a special issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, has revealed that the aftermath of 2015 and 2016 forest fires in the Amazon resulted in CO2 emissions three to four times greater than comparable estimates from existing global fire emissions databases.

The finding is part of a series of results published this week by Lancaster University researchers who were working in the heart of the site of one of the worst forest fires the Amazon has seen in a generation.

Researchers say uncontrolled wildfires in the understorey – or ground level – of humid tropical forests during extreme droughts are a large and poorly quantified source of CO2 emissions.

The study ‘Quantifying immediate carbon emissions from El Niño-mediated wildfires in humid tropical forests’ looked at a 6.5 million hectare region, of which almost 1 million hectares of primary and secondary forests burned during the 2015-2016 El Niño (an area approximately the size of half of Wales).

Although the area analyzed covers less than 0.2% of Brazilian Amazonia, these wildfires resulted in expected immediate CO2 emissions of over 30 Million tonnes, three to four times greater than comparable estimates from global fire emissions databases.

Lead author Kieran Withey of Lancaster University said : “Uncontrolled understorey wildfires in humid tropical forests during extreme droughts are a large and poorly quantified source of CO2 emissions . These u¬nderstory fires completely consumed leaf litter and fine woody debris, while partially burning coarse woody debris; resulting in high immediate CO2 emissions. This analysis covers an area of just 0.7% of Brazil, but the amount of carbon lost corresponds to 6% of the annual emissions of the whole of Brazil in 2014.”

At the end of 2015, Santarém in the Brazilian state of Pará, was one of the epicenters of that year’s El Niño. The region experienced a severe drought and extensive forest fires and the researchers were working right in the middle of it. Scientists from ‘ECOFOR’, the international research project led by Professor Jos Barlow from Lancaster University, had installed 20 study plots in Santarém, eight of which burned.

The research team quickly realized they had the opportunity to document in detail how a forest responds to fire on this scale.

Dr Erika Berenguer of Oxford and Lancaster University, and colleagues found that following the fires, the surviving trees grew significantly more than those located in unburned forests, regardless of their history of previous human disturbance. On average trees in burned areas of forest grew 249% more than trees in forests hit by drought but not fire. Although the growth rate is good news, this large increase in growth appears to be a relatively short-term response.

Professor Jos Barlow of Lancaster University said: “Only a few trees can survive these wildfires, as Amazonian forests did not co-evolve with this threat. So even though surviving trees grow faster in burned forests, this does not compensate the large carbon loss that results from tree mortality.”

Meanwhile, Camila V. J. Silva of Lancaster University led research including 31 other burned plots across the Brazilian Amazon, which showed that even 30 years after a fire, seemingly ‘recovered’ forests still hold 25% less carbon than nearby undisturbed primary forests.

She said: “Wildfires in humid tropical forests can significantly reduce forest biomass for decades by enhancing mortality rates of large and high wood density trees (such as Brazil Nut or Mahogany) , which store the largest amount of biomass in old growth forests. Our work has demonstrated that wildfires significantly slow down or stall the post-fire recovery of Amazonian forests.

Dr Berenguer said: “Overall, our combined results highlight the importance of considering wildfires in Brazilian forest conservation and climate change policies. With climate models projecting a hotter and drier future for the Amazon basin, wildfires are likely to become more widespread. The continued failure to consider wildfires in public policies will lead to shorter fire-return intervals, with forests being unable to recover their carbon stocks.”

oddlers with asthma are more likely to become obese children, according to an international study led by USC scientists.

The finding is a turnabout for children’s health as obesity has often been seen as a precursor to asthma in children, not the other way around. The study, conducted by a team of 40 scientists including researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, was recently published in the European Respiratory Journal.

This is the largest study yet about early-onset asthma and obesity. It focused on more than 20,000 youths across Europe. It shows that, beyond wheezing and shortness of breath, asthma can lead to bodies that make young people more susceptible to other health problems later in life.

Lida Chatzi, the senior author and professor of preventive medicine at USC, says asthma and obesity pack a one-two punch against children’s health, which raises concern about a public health crisis due to their prevalence.

“We care about this issue because asthma affects approximately 6.5 million children – about one in 10 – in the United States,” Chatzi said. “It’s a chronic childhood disorder and if it increases the risk of obesity, we can advise parents and physicians on how to treat it and intervene to help young children grow up to enjoy healthy, adult lives.”

For two decades, scientists have documented the parallel epidemics of childhood asthma and obesity, with focus on how obesity is a risk factor for asthma. In adults, obesity is an important risk factor for new asthma, especially among women, but the relationships appear to differ in children. Few studies look at the problem the other way around to understand how asthma contributes to obesity in kids, which prompted scientists to undertake this research.

Drawing upon big data on children’s health collected across Europe, the scientists investigated 21,130 children born between 1990 and 2008 across nine countries, including Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

The children were diagnosed by physicians with asthma at 3 to 4 years old and the scientists followed toddlers into childhood up to 8 years of age. Their goal was to focus on health risks of early-onset asthma.

On average, the scientists found that children diagnosed with asthma had a 66 percent higher risk of becoming obese than those without an asthma diagnosis. For children with persistent wheezing symptoms, their risk of developing obesity was 50 percent greater compared to children without such symptoms. Children with active asthma were nearly twice as likely to develop obesity than those without asthma and wheezing, according to the study. The findings are consistent with previous, but smaller, longitudinal studies conducted in the United States that observed asthma increased the risk of obesity.

The causal direction between asthma and obesity is not well understood. Asthma is regarded as a barrier to children’s physical activity that might lead to accumulation of fat in the body, while higher doses of inhaled corticosteroids had been hypothesized to increase risk of obesity in children with asthma. According to the study, children with asthma who used medication had the strongest risk of developing obesity.

Since both asthma and obesity have their origins early in life, it is possible that the asthma-obesity association is also established in this critical time window of child development. Previous studies have shown that in utero exposures, such as prenatal diet or maternal obesity, are associated with increased risk of both disorders.

“Asthma may contribute to the obesity epidemic. We urgently need to know if prevention and adequate treatment of asthma can reduce the trajectory toward obesity,” said Frank Gilliland, professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine, who participated in the study.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 40 percent of Americans, or 93 million, are obese. The estimated annual medical cost of obesity nationwide was $147 billion in 2008, the CDC estimates. Obesity is linked to diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure and stroke.

The CDC reports the number of people with asthma in the United States is growing every year. About one in 12 Americans is afflicted with the illness. In smoggy places, like California’s San Joaquin Valley, about 1 in 6 children suffer from asthma, the highest rate in the country.

In Europe, 1 in 8 people die due to lung diseases – or about one person per minute. It includes well-known diseases like asthma and lung cancer and other less-known diseases like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which is now the third most common cause of death, according to the European Respiratory Society.

The first “fine-grained” analysis of local authority budgets across Britain since 2010 has found that the average reduction in service spending by councils was almost 24% in England compared to just 12% in Wales and 11.5% in Scotland.

While some areas – Glasgow, for example – experienced significant service loss, the new study suggests that devolved powers have allowed Scottish and Welsh governments to mitigate the harshest local cuts experienced in parts of England.

University of Cambridge researchers found that, across Britain, the most severe cuts to local service spending between 2010 and 2017 were generally associated with areas of “multiple deprivation”.

This pattern is clearest in England, where all 46 councils that cut spending by 30% or more are located. These local authorities tend to be more reliant on central government, with lower property values and fewer additional funding sources, as well as less ability to generate revenue through taxes.

The north was hit with the deepest cuts to local spending, closely followed by parts of London. The ten worst affected councils include Salford, South Tyneside, Wigan, Oldham and Gateshead, as well as the London boroughs of Camden, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Kensington and Chelsea. Westminster council had a drop in service spending of 46% – the most significant in the UK.

The research also shows a large swathe of southern England, primarily around the ‘home counties’, with low levels of reliance on central government and only relatively minor local service cuts. Northern Ireland was excluded from the study due to limited data.

The authors of the new paper, published in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, say the findings demonstrate how austerity has been pushed down to a local level, “intensifying territorial injustice” between areas.

They argue that initiatives claimed by government to ameliorate austerity, such as local retention of business taxes, will only fuel unfair competition and inequality between regions – as local authorities turn to “beggar thy neighbor” policies in efforts to boost tax bases and buffer against austerity.

“The idea that austerity has hit all areas equally is nonsense,” said geographer Dr Mia Gray, who conducted the research with her Cambridge colleague Dr Anna Barford.

“Local councils rely to varying degrees on the central government, and we have found a clear relationship between grant dependence and cuts in service spending.

“The average cuts to local services have been twice as deep in England compared to Scotland and Wales. Cities have suffered the most, particularly in the old industrial centres of the north but also much of London,” said Gray.

“Wealthier areas can generate revenues from business tax, while others sell off buildings such as former back offices to plug gaping holes in council budgets.

“The councils in greatest need have the weakest local economies. Many areas with populations that are ageing or struggling to find employment have very little in the way of a public safety net.

“The government needs to decide whether it is content for more local authorities to essentially go bust, in the way we have already seen in Northamptonshire this year,” she said.

The latest study, which comes as England’s county councils predict at least £1 billion in further cutbacks by 2020, used data from the Institute of Fiscal Studies to conduct a spatial analysis of Britain’s local authority funding system.

Gray and Barford mapped the levels of central grant dependence across England’s councils, and the percentage fall of service spend by local authorities across Scotland, Wales and England between financial years 2009/2010 and 2016/2017.

Some of the local services hit hardest across the country include highways and transport, culture, adult social care, children and young people’s services, and environmental services.

The part of central government formerly known as the Department of Communities and Local Government experienced a dramatic overall budget cut of 53% between 2010 and 2016.

As budget decisions were hit at a local level, “mandatory” council services – those considered vital – were funded at the expense of “discretionary” services. However, the researchers found these boundaries to be blurry.

“Taking care of ‘at risk’ children is a mandatory concern. However, youth centres and outreach services are considered unessential and have been cut to the bone. Yet these are services that help prevent children becoming ‘at risk’ in the first place,” said Gray.

“There is a narrative at national and local levels that the hands of politicians are tied, but many of these funding decisions are highly political. Public finance is politics hidden in accounting columns.”

Gray points out that once local councils “go bust” and Section 114 notices are issued, as with Northamptonshire Council, administrators are sent in who then take financial decisions that supersede any democratic process.

In an unusual collaboration, the research has also contributed to the development of a new play by the Menagerie Theatre Company that explores the effects of austerity.

In a forum-theatre performance, audience members help guide characters through situations taken from the lives of those in austerity-hit Britain. The play will be performed in community venues across the country during October and November.

Gray added: “Ever since vast sums of public money were used to bail out the banks a decade ago, the British people have been told that there is no other choice but austerity imposed at a fierce and relentless rate.”

“We are now seeing austerity policies turn into a downward spiral of disinvestment in certain people and places. Local councils in some communities are shrunk to the most basic of services. This could affect the life chances of entire generations born in the wrong part of the country.”

Salt is essential for life. As ancient civilizations evolved from hunters and gatherers to agrarian societies, it has not been clear how people acquired this mineral that is a biological necessity. However, an anthropologist at LSU discovered remnants of an ancient salt works in Belize that provide clues on how the ancient Maya at the peak of their civilization more than 1,000 years ago produced, stored and traded this valuable mineral. New analyses of stone tools found at this site, called the Paynes Creek Salt Works, reveal that not only were the Maya making salt in large quantities, but they were salting fish and meat to meet dietary needs and producing a commodity that could be stored and traded.

“Since we found virtually no fish or other animal bones during our sea-floor survey or excavations, I was surprised that the microscopic markings on the stone tools, which we call ‘use-wear,’ showed that most of the tools were used to cut or scrape fish or meat,” said Heather McKillop, the study’s lead author and the Thomas & Lillian Landrum Alumni Professor in the LSU Department of Geography & Anthropology.

McKillop worked on this study with co-author Professor Kazuo Aoyama from Ibaraki University in Japan who is an expert on the use-wear damage on stone tools. McKillop’s study site is a 3-square-mile area surrounded by mangrove forest that had been buried beneath a saltwater lagoon due to sea level rise.

“Sea level rise completely submerged these sites underwater,” she said.

The soggy mangrove soil, or peat, is acidic and disintegrates bone, shells and microfossils made from calcium carbonate. Therefore, no remnants of fish or animal bones were found. However, the mangrove peat preserves wood, which normally decays in the rainforest of Central America. After finding the preserved wood in 2004, McKillop and her students mapped and excavated the underwater sites with funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society. They discovered more than 4,000 wooden posts that outline a series of buildings used as salt kitchens where brine was boiled in pots over fires to make salt. The pottery is also used in modern and historic salt-making and is called briquetage.

The salt was hardened in pots to form salt cakes and used to salt fish and meat, which were storable commodities that could be transported to marketplaces by canoe within the region. The Classic Maya from 300-900 A.D. may have traveled by boat along the coast and up rivers to cities about 15 miles inland to trade and barter.

“These discoveries substantiate the model of regional production and distribution of salt to meet the biological needs of the Classic Maya,” McKillop said.

Internet use may decrease the likelihood of a person affiliating with a religious tradition or believing that only one religion is true, according to a Baylor University study.

That may be because Internet use encourages religious “tinkering,” said Baylor sociologist and researcher Paul K. McClure.

“Tinkering means that people feel they’re no longer beholden to institutions or religious dogma,” he said. “Today, perhaps in part because many of us spend so much time online, we’re more likely to understand our religious participation as free agents who can tinker with a plurality of religious ideas — even different, conflicting religions — before we decide how we want to live.”

For example, while many Millennials have been influenced by their Baby Boomer parents when it comes to religion, the Internet exposes them to a broader array of religious traditions and beliefs and may encourage them to adjust their views or experiment with their beliefs, perhaps adopting a less exclusive view of religion, McClure said.

His study — “Tinkering with Technology and Religion in the Digital Age” — is published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

The study also examined television viewing and found that it was linked to religion, but in a different way — lower religious attendance and other religious activities that take time. But McClure noted that lower religious attendance of TV viewers may be because some are ill, injured, immobile or older and incapable of taking part, and some may simply watch television to pass the time.

In 2010, when this survey was first conducted, people were spending more time on average watching television, but that has changed today as more people are spending time online or on their smartphones instead, McClure said.

“Both TV and the Internet require time, and the more time we spend using these technologies, the less time we have to participate in religious activities or with more traditional communities,” he said.

In his research, McClure analyzed used data from Wave III of Baylor Religion Survey, a survey of 1,714 adults nationwide ages 18 and older. Gallup Organization administered the surveys, with a variety of questions, in fall 2010.

In the data analyzed by McClure, participants were asked:

• How often they took part in religious activities, among them religious attendance, church socials, religious education programs, choir practice, Bible study, prayer groups and witnessing/sharing faith.
• How much they agreed on a scale of 1 to 4 with the statements “All of the religions in the world are equally true” and “All around the world, no matter what religion they call themselves, people worship the same God.”
• How many hours a day they spent surfing the Internet and how many hours they spent watching TV.
• What religious group(s) they were affiliated with, including a category of “none.”

The analysis also took into account such variables as age, race, gender, education, place of residence and political party. While those factors had varying impact on religious beliefs, despite the differences, “the more time one spends on the Internet, the greater the odds are that that person will not be affiliated with a religion,” McClure said.

While the Internet is nearly 26 years old, 87 percent of American adults use it, compared with before 1995, when fewer than 15 percent were online, according to a 2014 report by the Pew Forum Internet Project.

Sociologists debate how Internet use affects people.

“Some see it as a tool to improve our lives; others see it as a new kind of sociocultural reality,” McClure said.

Scholars point out that the Internet may corral people into like-minded groups, similar to how Google customizes search results and advertisements based on prior search history. Additionally, many congregations — some 90 percent, according to previous research — use email and websites for outreach, and more than a third have both an Internet and Facebook presence.

Other scholars have found that when people choose ways to communicate, some often choose a less intimate way — such as texting rather than talking.

McClure noted that sociological research about the impact of the Internet is difficult for scholars because its swift changes make it a moving target.

“In the past decade, social networking sites have mushroomed, chat rooms have waned, and television and web browsing have begun to merge into one another as live streaming services have become more popular,” McClure said.

His study has limitations, such as measuring only the amount of time people spent on the Internet, not what they were doing online, McClure said. But the research may benefit scholars seeking to understand how technologies shape religious views.

“Whether through social media or the sheer proliferation of competing truth-claims online, the Internet is the perfect breeding ground for new ‘life-worlds’ that chip away at one’s certainty,” McClure said.

Anyone still unsure of how (or even whether) they’ll vote in the midterms should consider this: All three branches of government are now under the control of one party, and that party is under the control of Donald J. Trump.

With the addition of Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court is as firmly Republican as are the House and Senate.

Kavanaugh was revealed as a fierce partisan – not only the legal advisor who helped Kenneth Starr prosecute Bill Clinton and almost certainly guided George W. Bush’s use of torture, but also a nominee who believes “leftists” and Clinton sympathizers are out to get him.

He joins four other Republican-appointed jurists, almost as partisan. Thomas, Alito, and Roberts have never wavered from Republican orthodoxy. Neil Gorsuch, although without much track record on the Supreme Court to date, was a predictable conservative Republican vote on the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit – which is why the Heritage Foundation pushed for him and Trump appointed him.

Even under normal circumstances, when all three branches are under the control of the same party we get a lopsided government that doesn’t respond to the values of a large portion of the electorate.

But these are not normal circumstances. Donald Trump is President.

Need I remind you? Trump is a demagogue who doesn’t give a fig for democracy – who continuously and viciously attacks the free press, Democrats, immigrants, Muslims, black athletes exercising First Amendment rights, women claiming sexual harassment, anyone who criticizes or counters him; who treats the executive branch, including the Justice Department, like his own fiefdom, and brazenly profits off his office; who tells lies like other people breathe; and who might well have conspired with Vladimir Putin to swing the election his way.

Trump doesn’t even pretend to be the president of all the people. As he repeatedly makes clear in rallies and tweets, he is president of his “base.”

And his demagoguery is by now unconstrained in the White House. Having fired the few “adults” in his Cabinet, Trump is now on the loose (but for a few advisors who reportedly are trying to protect the nation from him).

All this would be bad enough even if the two other branches of government behaved as the framers of the Constitution expected, as checks and balances on a president. But under Republican leadership, they refuse to play this role when it comes to Trump.

House and Senate Republicans have morphed into Trump sycophants and toadies – intimidated, spineless, opportunistic. The few who have dared call him on his outrages aren’t running for reelection.

Some have distanced themselves from a few of his most incendiary tweets or racist rantings, but most are obedient lapdogs on everything else – including Trump’s reluctance to protect the integrity of our election system, his moves to prevent an investigation into Russian meddling, his trade wars, his attacks on NATO and the leaders of other democracies, his swooning over dictators, his cruelty toward asylum-seekers, and, in the Senate, his Supreme Court nominees.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has emerged as Trump’s most shameless lackey who puts party above nation and Trump above party. The House leadership is no better. House intelligence chair Devin Nunes is Trump’s chief flunky and apologist, but there are many others.

Now that Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court, you can forget about the Court constraining Trump, either.

Kavanaugh’s views of presidential power and executive privilege are so expansive he’d likely allow Trump to fire Mueller, shield himself from criminal prosecution, and even pardon himself. Kavanaugh’s Republican brethren on the Court would probably go along.

So how are the constitutional imperative of checks and balances to be salvaged, especially when they’re so urgently needed?

The only remedy is for voters to flip the House or Senate, or ideally both, on November 6^th.

The likelihood of this happening is higher now with Kavanaugh on the Court and Trump so manifestly unchecked. Unless, that is, enough voters have become so demoralized and disillusioned they just give up.

If cynicism wins the day, Trump and those who would delight in the demise of American democracy (including, not incidentally, Putin) will get everything they want. They will have broken America.

For the sake of the values we hold dear – and of the institutions of our democracy that our forbearers relied on and our descendants will need – this cannot be allowed.

It is now time to place a firm check on this most unbalanced of presidents, and vote accordingly.

Ever more commentators are suggesting that the continuing demonstrations in Ingushetia against the border accord Yunus-Bek Yevkurov signed with Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov have become “the Maidan in Magas,” an analogy that gained added power today when Yevkurov “fled” to Moscow (babr24.com/msk/?IDE=181741 and newsland.com/community/4765/content/demarkatsiia-razdora-chto-proiskhodit-v-ingushetii/6503927).

Others have suggested that the demonstrations are likely to be the trigger for a new war in the North Caucasus, with some even suggesting that such a conflict could mark the end of Putin’s presidency just as his earlier attack on Chechnya in 1999 allowed him to rise to power (rusmonitor.com/majjdan-v-ingushetii-predveshhaet-novuyu-vojjnu-na-kavkaze-i-raspad-rf.html and facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2059915254071443&id=100001589654713).

Meanwhile, below these interpretations, the protests continued for their fourth day into their fourth night. Parliamentary officials from Magas and Grozny met under the auspices of presidential plenipotentiary for the North Caucasus the with the latter assuring the former that Chechnya has no need of a single meter of Ingush land (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/326282/).

In Moscow, Putin’s press spokesman, Dmitry Peskov said that the Kremlin was following the situation closely but insisted that any resolution of the conflict must come as a result of an agreement between the leaders of the two republics rather than by fiat from the center, thus effectively disclaiming responsibility for what is going on (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/326389/).

That reaction has prompted some Ingush and others to observe that this suggests that the Kremlin has nothing to say and thus is increasingly irrelevant as far as what will happen next is concerned (rusmonitor.com/socseti-majjdan-v-magase-gde-reakciya-kremlya.html and blog.newsru.com/article/08oct2018/ingushetiya).

The demonstrators said they would not end their protest until their goals of denunciation of the border accord and the removal of Yevkurov are achieved and did not disperse at night as the Ingush government had demanded in agreeing to the continuation of demonstrations for the next week (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/326381/).

They have, however, agreed to move to a new location in Magas because it provides easier communication with the population (meduza.io/news/2018/10/08/uchastniki-mitinga-v-ingushetii-pereshli-na-novoe-mesto-ranee-vlasti-soglasovali-nedelnuyu-aktsiyu-protesta)..

Former republic head Ruslan Aushev’s appearance and his denunciation of the border accord have brought more people into the streets, with their number rising from several hundred to about 2,000 after he spoke, although the authorities have been putting out consistently low-ball figures (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/326359/).